Percy Bysshe Shelley’s masterpiece, Ozymandias, is an essential. And with salute to the upcoming Watchmen release, I encourage you to take a moment and read Shelley’s sonnet if you haven’t previously, or reacquaint yourself if you have:

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 shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d 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.

If you can read this poem and remain unmoved, your heart is hewn from the same stone Of that colossal wreck. The imagery of this poem haunts me: the wasteland stretching far and away, the windswept sand battering the shatter’d visage, the vanity of power, nature’s and time’s ultimate conquest over human folly, and the emptiness of existence.

And on the pedestal these words appear: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” How many rulers throughout the ages have echoed this sentiment? How many of the influential, the wealthy, the powerful? Who’s not felt the “proud man’s contumely?” On a lesser scale, does not this sentiment even crop up within your small set? Within your family perhaps? Your church? Your place of employment?

Meaningless! Meaningless! said the preacher. And he was right. How our works suppurate and decay with the onslaught of unfettered time, works of we, the present unknowns, most of all. Yet how many Pharaohs of Egypt can you name? Chinese Dynastics? I wager few within our own present culture are able to name all American Presidents, much less the most powerful and influential men and women of times long past.

Sobering, indeed, and crippling when Shelley’s boundless and bare vision adds a desolate texture to our human predicament: as some of your own poets have said: we are alone. We are meaningless. We are purposeless. We are absurd.

Without God, that is. Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.

He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!” Then he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.”

He said to me: “It is done. I am the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End. To him who is thirsty I will give to drink without cost from the spring of the water of life. He who overcomes will inherit all of this, and I will be his God and he will be my son.