Ozymandias had a Mother
Good Morning Friends,
Today we look at the masterful sonnet of Shelley, with the scripture that may have inspired it and some that Shelley should have taken to heart. We do this against the backdrop of modern day pop culture, in the hopes that something better might be created. It is sad that in our culture we worship a pantheon of manmade gods with sports figures and politicians given the highest honors and then rock stars and movie stars followed by TV stars.
In Shelley’s time it may have been writers. If not carefull these people can get insulated from the spirit…choked off from God… drowning in money and the corporate handlers who remake people into commercialized creatures. Their souls get eaten. It is part of a system of evil. Ultimately it did not work for Shelley. More recently it did not work for Pat Boone nor for Michael Jackson, and it did not work for Britney Spires and I doubt it will work for Miley Cyrus. The MTV awards are a perfect example of created creatures of the night following a false light…They go to extremes to shock…on the well-worn path of destruction. Here facing the impersonal, indiscriminate, destructive power of history we tend to forget that Ozymandias had a Mother.
Scripture: Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.
Proverbs 16:18 (KJV)
For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.
I John 2:16 (KJV)
The voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field: The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.
Isaiah 40:6-8 (KJV)
Message: Today’s scripture is from the King James Version and I use it because like the Shelley poem below it uses the beauty of iambic pentameter. Read the poem and see the hubris of all of humanity…the presumption of our own greatness.
I met a traveler 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.
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.
The author of Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley was friends with John Keats and Robert Louis Stevenson. He married, after divorcing his first wife, the author of the book Frankenstein, Mary Shelley. He exercised and promoted sexual freedom for the time. Not unsurprisingly both his wife and wife to be were pregnant at the same time. Interestingly, his father was a Member of Parliament and his mother a Christian but he, even though a man of deep conviction and is memorialized in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey, did not believe in God. He died just before his 30th birthday, likely murdered. His poem is however noteworthy. It is devoted to a single metaphor: the shattered, ruined statue in the desert wasteland, with its arrogant and insane inscription “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” The boast of course has been disproved; Ozymandias’s works have crumbled and disappeared, his civilization is gone, all has been turned to dust.
Praythat scripture be a light unto our path. Pray we realize that even though some people without faith may have something worth listening to that they do not necessarily have something worth following. Pray we rejoice that the church is still here…that the message gets passed on from one generation to another despite those who fall away from the faith. Pray people in power would stop creating monsters…eating people’s souls. Pray we put our faith in things that last. Pray we create more Christian Culture.
Blessings,
John Lawson
Daily Devotionals 