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16
Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook
That failure of material ambitions stands immortalised for us in Shelley's "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!"
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!"
That is a moral which we shall do well to remember. All great possessions materially founded come at last to that, and the heart that clings to them must go down after them to the grave.
It is the same when we base our delight of human relationship in an insistence upon possession: it serves only to accentuate the place of death in the world and to give it size. The man, or woman, whose idea of love lies in the claim to possess and to control others, dies many deaths before he reaches his final end, and walks daily with his foot in the grave. These tragedies of possession, so impoverishing to the spirit, are all round us; the world is
