Each Romantic is underestimated after Eliot's strictures but worth reading, amazing writers who make us return to them again and again if we like reading English poetry. One of those really not recognized as much as he should be is Percy Bysshe Shelley, partly due to Arnold's calling him "an ineffectual angel beating his luminous wings in the void". As for me Shelley never ceases to enthrall me, whether with his Ode to the West Wind or his poem on Manchester or his play the Cenci, which is in the classic Shakespearean mould, but of course, he is world-famous for his sonnet against tyranny.
Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias"
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
"Shelley's "Ozymandias" is a sonnet, written in iambic pentameter, but with an atypical rhyme scheme (ABABA CDCEDEFEF) when compared to other English-language sonnets, and without the characteristic octave-and-sestet structure." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias)
It is comforting to think that this will be the end of Donald Trump
too and today's tyrants starting from Jair Bolsonoro to Narendra
Modi and ending with Boris Johnson or Vladimir Putin as well
as Xi Jinping (Winnie the Pooh), Kim Jong Un and the whole kit
and kaboodle of the neofascist rulers. While they are not yet
Hitlers, in their alliances and similarities and commonalities in
decision making where they prioritize themselves and their
supporters over the deaths of the many in their nations, they are
rulers of "cold command," though the "sneer" and the "wrinkled
lip" may be hidden from the view of the populace. Shelley might
have been an atheist but it is the prophetic voice that appears
here that is Biblical in its resonance pronouncing to the king who
thinks he is God that he is only dust and will return to dust.
Please do not think Islamic dictators are exempt. Or Aung San Su, from Shelley's scathing
indictment. No ruler or government is. whether French, Australian,
Canadian, German or Pakistani, Bhutanese, Bangladeshi, Nepalese, Syrian, Saudi Arabian, Yemeni,
Iranian, Israelite (Benjamin Netanyahu), Iraqi, Afghanistani, Turkish (Erdogan), the Hamas,
Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, neo-Nazi white supremacists groups like
the Knight Templars etc. I have extended the list to warlords and terror
-mongers too now, who lead such groups
of all hues and shapes, varieties or sizes.
The voice of the rebel and the unafraid who know that
the message of the traveller speaks the truth, and not that of
Ozymandias who is only a victim of megalomania
and verbose grandiloquence, and does not know that the King of
Kings, the real one, catches the wise in their wisdom and the
crafty in their craftiness, as "He shews himself wise to the wise
and crafty to the crafty" in the long run, so they are scattered
as specks of dust in the wind and in the sand nothing of them remains
except as a warning to future tyrants that they too are only grains of sand, not like the Blakean
ones, but mere grains of sand. And how exactly does God overthrow tyranny?
Through poets like Shelley and the sculptor and even the traveller who brings the news,
as well as through the common people, through their hardiness, long-suffering, endurance,
persistence, perseverance, and rebellion or dissent or protest or silence or revolution
or revolt, their steadfastness in holding on to the truth,
and if none of these things works, by spiritual forces or by divine intervention.
So what makes Shelley and this sonnet unique? It is unique as it is the poetic, prophetic voice that speaks the truth to power timelessly, much more effectively than Milton's Piedmont sonnet does.
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