
Ozymandias - _ttg
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias
======
gerdesj
When Roman generals were allowed a triumphal march after a decent enough
victory, a slave would be placed in the chariot. The slave was mandated to
constantly repeat in the ear of the general "You are mortal" or words to that
effect. The idea was to remind the general not to get above himself.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias)
gives two versions of "Ozymandias" (scroll to halfway to read them.) They are
both rather good and should speak loud across the centuries.

There are many simmering tensions (and quite a few outright wars) around the
world. Some of those simmering tensions, that involve the really big
proponents, are starting to look quite close to the boil.

Remember Ozymandias and the futility of conceit. Romans getting a slave to
murmur stuff is what we might call "value signalling" these days.

We are enjoying a relatively peaceful period in human history. It would be
nice if that continued. When I say enjoying, I'm obviously not referring to
Syria, Yemen and other war zones or zones of continual atrocity.

~~~
h0l0cube
> "You are mortal" or words to that effect

'Momento mori'?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori#In_classical_anti...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori#In_classical_antiquity)

> The Stoic Epictetus told his students that when kissing their child,
> brother, or friend, they should remind themselves that they are mortal,
> curbing their pleasure, as do "those who stand behind men in their triumphs
> and remind them that they are mortal"

~~~
Robotbeat
See, this is why Stoicism just isn’t for me. This curbing of the positive
(emotional attachment to friends and family) to make the negative less bad and
more tolerable. Stoicism strikes me as a(n effective!) defense mechanism for
folks with excruciatingly terrible lives, but honestly seems to take too much
of the spice out of life for my tastes. I’m a very emotional person, and I’ve
learned to embrace that.

~~~
_dekeract_
The point of stoicism is not curbing of positive emotions, rather accepting
negative emotions as fundamental, unavoidable part of life. From personal
experience, stoicism is what worked for me. It helped me deal with anxiety.

Reminding yourself that something negative can happen might strengthen your
control over your emotions.

Stoicism has never stopped me at enjoying my life, in fact it made me enjoy my
life more.

I have a situation with my girlfriend, she is always worried that she might
lose me. I tell her I'm not afraid of losing her and she might think it is
because she loves me more. But to me losing her was always a possibility due
to my stoic mindset. It is not because I don't love her or appreciate time
with her. I'm just at peace with possibility of something bad happening to me.

~~~
Robotbeat
The ancient stoics like Aurelius definitely seemed to be talking about curbing
both the positive AND the negative emotions. I was surprised by this when I
listened to the words of Aurelius.

Newer stoic philosophy may be different.

~~~
h0l0cube
> Aurelius definitely seemed to be talking about curbing both the positive AND
> the negative emotions

I think you're right about this. But there's nothing to say you couldn't take
the useful aspects of a particular philosophy and discard the rest. For
example, Cato the Younger adopted the fortitude of stoic principles to
filibuster the senate, though I believe he didn't behave in the manner of the
stoics during his lifetime.

But, as you say, Aurelius was particularly proud of his ability to forgo
pleasure, especially when it was readily available to him. I don't think this
is at-all necessary to forgo pleasure in order to reduce one's own suffering.
That a buddhist monk can sit still while being set alight seems to be strong
evidence that pain can be assuaged by mind training alone.

Edit: I looked up self-immolation, and it turns out 'self-mummification' is a
thing too.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokushinbutsu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokushinbutsu)

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
The Ozymandias referred to in this poem is the Greek name of Rameses II.

He was arguably the most powerful and successful Pharaoh in all of Egyptian
history. He became Pharaoh as a teenager, led an invasion of the Levant
against the Hittites, and almost single handedly through great personal
bravery turned what would have been a crushing defeat into a stalemate at the
Battle of Kadesh. He also extended the Egyptian power south into Sudan. Egypt
probably reached the pinnacle of her wealth and power under him. He is thought
to have lived into his 90's and reigned 66 years. He fathered roughly 100
children (~50 sons and ~50 daughters). His whole life, he was treated as god
on earth.

The reason I bring this up is that the person Shelley is referring to is not
some obscure person. In our wildest dreams, none of us could ever hope to
reach the level of significance of Rameses II. In terms of reaching the
pinnacle of success, Rameses did it: famous, powerful, rich, huge family,
beloved by everyone around him, long life, etc.

Yet he died. His accomplishments decayed. His kingdom eventually fell. His
statues fell over and went into decay (though some are around and his temple
at Abu Simbel is still amazing).

Remember, all our greatest accomplishments and any fame we could hope to
accomplish are all ultimately fleeting. In our quest for significance, we
should not forget to enjoy the moments we have now.

~~~
ozmbie
This what my takeaway from watching Baraka again recently:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baraka_(film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baraka_\(film\))

While the film doesn't focus on any particular person, it covers society at
large. It portrays the build-up of a modern, global society and eventually
shows shots of ancient Egypt ruins. We are no different. One too all of this
will be gone.

~~~
garren
Baraka is a really good film. Samsara, made later, is also good, but not quite
at the level of its predecessor. Both available on Amazon.

------
svat
“On the Vanity of Earthly Greatness” (1930) by Arthur Guiterman:

 _The tusks which clashed in mighty brawls_

 _Of mastodons, are billiard balls._

 _The sword of Charlemagne the Just_

 _Is Ferric Oxide, known as rust._

 _The grizzly bear, whose potent hug,_

 _Was feared by all, is now a rug._

 _Great Caesar 's bust is on the shelf,_

 _And I don 't feel so well myself._

~~~
pastrami_panda
Thank you so much, I've memorized a few poems (Ozymandias being the first one)
and this one will surely be added to that list. I really like this kind of
theme, if you know more please share.

~~~
svat
There are a couple more poems I know and love on a similar theme, but they're
probably not of interest to this audience as they're in Sanskrit :-) ( _“सा
रम्या नगरी…” by Bhartṛhari, “ मान्धाता स महीपतिः…” by Bhoja, and “…शान्त्यै
मनो दीयताम्” by Kṣemendra_ )

Not another poem on that theme, but something cool I remembered related to
Ozymandias: Gilbert Adair, somewhere in his amazing translation ( _A Void_ )
of Georges Perec's work _La Disparition_ — written entirely without a single
instance of the letter 'e' — has this rewrite of Ozymandias that maintains the
lipogram constraint (and rhyme):

 _Ozymandias_

 _I know a pilgrim from a distant land_

 _Who said: Two vast and sawn-off limbs of quartz_

 _Stand on an arid plain. Not far, in sand_

 _Half sunk, I found a facial stump, drawn warts_

 _And all; its curling lips of cold command_

 _Show that its sculptor passions could portray_

 _Which still outlast, stamp’d on unliving things,_

 _A mocking hand that no constraint would sway:_

 _And on its plinth this lordly boast is shown:_

 _“Lo, I am Ozymandias, king of kings:_

 _Look on my works, O Mighty, and bow down!”_

 _‘Tis all that is intact. Around that crust_

 _Of a colossal ruin, now windblown,_

 _A sandstorm swirls and grinds it into dust._

 _— PBS_

He does similar things in some places in the book with other works, such as
Poe's _The Raven_ :
[http://whatwouldpuskasdo.blogspot.com/2004/07/dropping-e.htm...](http://whatwouldpuskasdo.blogspot.com/2004/07/dropping-e.html)

And on the original theme, see also
[https://abstrusegoose.com/89](https://abstrusegoose.com/89)

~~~
gowld
> stamp’d

So close

~~~
svat
“stamp'd” doesn't contain an 'e', and such forms are accepted especially in
verse, and this is one of the tricks that Adair uses (sparingly) in his
translation. (Used less than other tricks:
[https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1557971160](https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1557971160))

------
simonh
I was reading a bit about Voyager 1 a few days ago and the possibility that in
hundreds of millions or billions of years it, and I suppose probes like it,
might be all that remain of humanity and all our works.

It’s a sobering thought. We are incredibly lucky enough to live at a crucial
inflection point in the story of our species. I suspect we may not be far from
achieving close to the limits of what is technologically possible, within the
next few centuries. What will our statues be, and how shall we write our
civilisation’s epitaph?

~~~
dreamcompiler
> how shall we write our civilisation’s epitaph?

Probably on a rad-hard zettabyte USB drive buried in a giant black slab, with
a backup on the moon.

~~~
IAmGraydon
Needs backup farther out. Earth and moon are due for vaporization via red
giant in ~5 billion years.

~~~
gowld
USB hard drives will be indecipherable approximately 5Billion years earlier.

------
occamschainsaw
I love this comic strip illustration of the poem:
[https://www.zenpencils.com/comic/ozymandias/](https://www.zenpencils.com/comic/ozymandias/)

Also, looking at an aging Ozymandias, played by Jeremy Irons, in the new
Watchmen show made me think of the poem again.

------
spodek
They left out the other version, Horace Smith's "Ozymandias":

\---

In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,

Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws

The only shadow that the Desert knows:—

"I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,

"The King of Kings; this mighty City shows

The wonders of my hand."— The City's gone,—

Naught but the Leg remaining to disclose

The site of this forgotten Babylon.

We wonder,—and some Hunter may express

Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness

Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,

He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess

What powerful but unrecorded race

Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

~~~
Arubis
As I recall, he and Shelly both composed these in a personal competition,
which Smith immediately conceded on seeing the other version.

------
koz_
This is my favourite poem and was before I even knew how layered and knotty it
is. In addition to its obvious interpretation it's also about readers and
reading, how even if you are the mightiest ruler who has ever lived you still
can't make people read you a certain way - the sculptor who "mocked" his
features may have found the king's intentions absurd even as he was forced to
sculpt his likeness.

It was an illustration by Shelley of the problems of a certain school of
literary thought at the time which held that the author of a text is the
ultimate arbiter of its meaning. That Shelley was able to make such an elegant
counter-argument and encode it as one of the most lyrically and thematically
beautiful poems of all time puts me in awe every time I think of it.

~~~
celebril
That's... really anachronistic.

The Death of the Author came about in 1967, even New Criticism, which
foreshadowed Death, came about only at the earliest the 1930s-40s, after IA
Richards published his Practical Criticism.

Shelley wrote in the Romantic period, when the artist's personal "genius" was
paramount as a conduit to the "sublime". Saying that he somehow whipped up a
criticism of "author as the arbiter of meaning" in what is practically a
product of a friendly poetry contest is plainly absurd.

Strangely you also attributed this anachronistic reading to Shelley, making it
somehow the author's intent to be counter-author-intent. Just... why?

~~~
koz_
Ah I see, thanks for setting me straight. I must have conflated someone's
later reading of the poem with the author's original intent.

------
oneplane
I wonder (with my limited knowledge on the exact nature of the language) why
we still print 'ye' if the 'y' was a shorthand for 'th' and therefore it
actually is pronounced 'the'. If we modify or modernise the other words in the
poem, why keep 'the' spelled using 'ye'? As far as I can tell it only causes
people the speak (or mentally read) the equivalent of 'yee'.

~~~
rgossiaux
You're confusing two different things. Ye as a plural pronoun is a bone fide
archaic English word, ultimately sharing an etymology with the still-extant
"you". "Ye" as an article ("Ye olde...") has the history you reference, where
the y comes from a stand-in for a thorn (th), and so was not supposed to be
pronounced as "yee". But ye as a pronoun (by far the most common usage, I
think, and the usage in the poem) is just a normal word and doesn't share that
history.

~~~
oneplane
Ah yes, the thorn was the one I was looking for. I remember reading something
about that when looking up the reason old pub signs in England sometimes had
the thorn and often 'ye' but are always actually supposed to be 'the' in
technically correct form.

------
toohotatopic
>[1]The name "Ozymandias" is a rendering in Greek of a part of Ramesses II's
throne name, User-maat-re Setep-en-re. The poems paraphrase the inscription on
the base of the statue, given by Diodorus Siculus in his Bibliotheca historica
as:

>>King of Kings am I, Osymandyas. If anyone would know how great I am and
where I lie, let him surpass one of my works.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias#Hubris](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias#Hubris)

Have we checked the quote? There seems to be just the upper half in the museum
but the other half should be lying somewhere.

------
0d9eooo
This poem often reminds me of geological timescale, which occurs over millions
of years or more. For example, the Carnian Pluvial Event was a relatively
humid rainy era that lasted for millions of years, beyond most of our
comprehension in practical terms ([https://laughingsquid.com/why-it-rained-
for-two-million-year...](https://laughingsquid.com/why-it-rained-for-two-
million-years/)), even though it's a relatively discrete period of time in the
grand scheme of Earth. Even the Permian extinction, the largest extinction
event in the history of known life, unfolded for over 60000 years. That is a
flicker on geological timescales, but supercedes by a wide margin the period
of recorded human history.

------
jsgo
The trailer for the final season of Breaking Bad had Walter White (Bryan
Cranston) reciting one of the versions to great effect and quite well sums up
the big series storyline:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T3dpghfRBHE](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T3dpghfRBHE)

~~~
vmurthy
The URL ^^ didn't work for me .

This one ->
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMySF1nkN8o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMySF1nkN8o)
worked for me in Australia

~~~
jsgo
That’s unfortunate, region locking?

The trailer was basically sequences from the desert (which is also where the
series starts. Very, very well done show) while he talks.

I almost wonder if Gilligan started off with that poem and constructed a loose
version of the story which grew into the layered thing that it is.

I remember wanting to be very disinterested in it due to the meth subject
matter, but geez, the sub plots, the symbolism, all of it was just
exceptionally well done.

------
pdkl95
exurb1a's variation, from his amazing video[1] "We're the Last Humans Left":

    
    
      My name is Homo sapiens, hominid of hominids;
      Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
    

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvbTFwXagdQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvbTFwXagdQ)

~~~
garren
I hadn’t heard of this video before, you’re right, it is amazing. It’s
interesting, a little dark, yet some how comforting in a way I’m not sure I
can articulate. If Voyager has a follow up, this is a message that should be
on it. Thank you so much for sharing.

------
mke
In the same spirit, Ulysses By Tennyson

[https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45392/ulysses](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45392/ulysses)

~~~
riffraff
We studied this poem in high school after having studied the Odyssey (where
Ulysses gets home) and the Divine Comedy (where Ulysses tells the story after
he travels past Hercules' columns).

So this poem filled the middle (staying in Ithaca until leaving) missing part!

In addition to being a fantastic poem in itself, it felt great to see how a
whole story could develop through different authors over so many centuries.

------
rasfincher
And its mate by Horace Smith.
[http://www.potw.org/archive/potw192.html](http://www.potw.org/archive/potw192.html)

------
ed25519FUUU
_”For agony and spoil Of nations beat to dust, For poisoned air and tortured
soil And cold, commanded lust,

And every secret woe The shuddering waters saw— Willed and fulfilled by highh
and low— Let them relearn the Law”_

Exerpt from _Justice_ , RUDYARD KIPLING 1918

[https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57432/justice-56d23af...](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57432/justice-56d23af4adb83)

------
082349872349872
Something I appreciate about country music is how it sometimes utilises a
chorus that may remain syntactically invariant throughout a song, but hearing
the intervening verses changes the semantics.

e.g.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vn6QdqxK3g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vn6QdqxK3g)

~~~
JadeNB
I don't mean to be rude, but I want to make sure I understand the relevance of
this. Are you referring to the way the inscription on Ozymandias's statue,
while remaining the same, has changed its perceived meaning over time?

~~~
082349872349872
Exactly.

(Thanks for asking! It's difficult to sustain a conversation here, but I
intermittently check comments up to a few days back in case they're in need of
expansion.)

~~~
callahad
You might appreciate [http://hnreplies.com/](http://hnreplies.com/), which
emails you whenever someone replies to one of your comments.

------
ourmandave
"I'm not a comic book villain." ~ Ozymandias

~~~
diffrinse
Unlike the movies, The Watchmen graphic novel takes the time to point out
Veidt's homage

------
darkerside
My favorite poem to pair this with is The New Colossus by Lazarus. I have to
imagine Lazarus was calling back not just to the ancient Colossus of Rhodes,
but also the lyrical colossus that is Ozymandias, towering over the sonnet
form.

Oh, and I don't want to spoil the ending for those who may not know, but it
has some significance besides its poetic beauty.

[https://poets.org/poem/new-colossus](https://poets.org/poem/new-colossus)

------
thwave

      my nam is King
      of ancient land
      and haf my face
      is under sand
      
      and on a stone
      it can be read
      “the World is mine”
      but now I’m ded
    

[https://alexicon-
art.tumblr.com/post/159203577946/ozymandias](https://alexicon-
art.tumblr.com/post/159203577946/ozymandias)

------
intrepidhero
I've always liked the sense of perspective conveyed in this poem. I was
introduced to it through the truly excellent
[https://ozyandmillie.org/comic/ozy-and-
millie-2/](https://ozyandmillie.org/comic/ozy-and-millie-2/).

EDIT: spelling

------
tardismechanic
Customary, a reading by Bryan Cranston
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3dpghfRBHE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3dpghfRBHE)

~~~
bzb3
>The uploader has not made this video available in your country.

This seems to go a little bit against the idea of the internet.

------
bori5
This makes a great appearance in one of the short stories in the movie the
Ballad of Buster Scruggs. A brilliant Coen brothers movie on Netflix.

~~~
undershirt
Harry Melling forever sealed the way that I read it.

------
recursivedoubts
rosebud

