I guess you’d get used to lukewarm coffee…

There are a lot of phrases we know but are unaware of their origins. Anyone who read the Watchmen graphic novel series or saw the movie is aware of a character whose hero identity is Ozymandias. A definite Trivial pursuit question here, who was the real Ozymandias?

The Rock Star of The Romantics?

Well, the name itself comes from a sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley. It is a meditation on the temporal nature of all things and it’s signature couplet is,

‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’

Why despair? This is one of the great examples of irony at work. The words are chiseled on the pedastal of a statue, immense and in ruins, abandoned in a vast desert.

It is believed Shelley was inspired by a statue of the pharaoh Ramesses II acquired by the British Museum. Ramesses deux was a hell of a statue builder. When it comes to rulers who love to build monuments to their own divinity, he definitely set the bar high.

So, class, here the mighty Ozymandias is saying, ‘no matter who you are, how much you acquire, how many lands you conquer, it will never match my achievements.’

The irony, of course, is that time has reduced this once mighty ruler to a broken statue, a shattered remanent, a few pieces of sandstone in a sea of sand. There are no works to look on, nothing mighty left.

Here is the Sonnet in full. For those of you English Literature nerds, it falls into the category of ‘Undefineable’ but may be considered Italian because the turn (volta), the change of rhyme scheme and the revelation of the overall metaphor occurs on the 9th line.

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”.

Okay, now to counter this cheery start to your Tuesday morning, I will share the reason for my meditating on Mr. O. I heard a BBC commentator talking about his extreme dislike of the trend in coffee places to ask for your name to put on the cup.

Most people give their name without thinking. Some chose to have a little fun giving names like Darth Vader, Abraham Lincoln and Henry VIII. He was standing behind a man who, when asked for his name, replied in plummy tones, “Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye mighty and despair.” Hard to fit it all on anything smaller than a Vente, I imagine but worth it to hear the barista call it out…