Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

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Memento Mori.
This modern world seeks to extend adolescence until the coffin lid closes. We treat aging and dying like some sort of horrible disease that can be avoided by ignoring it. Our lives are soft and padded and too many act like this will go on forever and what is important today will always remain important.
It’s a mirage.
Memento Mori. “Remember that you have to die.”
 
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”.

4 Comments

  1. Great poem. read it when I was a kid, still relevant today. When I think of Ozzymandis I think of the great harlot, and how she will be destroyed in an hour and become destitute. The fake edifice is crumbling before our very eyes. It makes me remember that even though I am in this world, I refuse to be of this world.

    • “It makes me remember that even though I am in this world, I refuse to be of this world.”
      Bingo. All this world’s works are nothing but dust in the long run. Lay up treasures where entropy doesn’t exist.

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