President Trump’s insatiable need to memorialize himself, whether it’s by putting his name on a long-standing building such as the Kennedy Center, minting gold coins, putting his signature on our currency, building a disgracefully tacky ballroom onto the White House, building a Trump Arch in Washington and now we have seen the plans for his presidential library.

All of this is his vain effort to immortalize himself as something far more than what he is brings to mind a couple of 19^th Century British poet friends who engaged in a friendly competition to see whose work would be published first. They probably had heard the announcement that the British Museum had acquired an eight-ton statue of Rameses II.

Both had experienced the classical education of the day, which probably led them to a story by the First Century, BCE, Greek historian Diodorus Siculus who described a great Egyptian statue with the inscription, “King of Kings Ozymandias am I. if any want to know how great I am and where I lie, let him outdo me in my works.”

Horace Smith wrote:

In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows:—
“I am great OZYMANDIAS,” saith the stone,
“The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
The wonders of my hand.”— The City’s gone,—
Naught but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.

We wonder — and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

The better-known of the poems is the one with the same name, Ozymandias¸ by Percy Bysshe Shelley, considered one of the greatest of the English romantic poets, who drowned in a sailing accident at the age of 29.  This is the one we are most likely to see in our English textbooks and in the compilations of great poems.

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.

The poem is considered a commentary on the impermanence of power and the fleeting of time.  Litcharts.com puts it this way:

The speaker relates a story a traveler told him about the ruins of a “colossal wreck” of a sculpture whose decaying physical state mirrors the dissolution of its subject’s—Ozymandias’s—power. Only two upright legs, a face, and a pedestal remain of Ozymandias’s original statue, and even these individual parts of the statue are not in great shape: the face, for instance, is “shattered.” Clearly, time hasn’t been kind to this statue, whose pitiful state undercuts the bold assertion of its inscription. The fact that even this “king of kings” lies decaying in a distant desert suggests that no amount of power can withstand the merciless and unceasing passage of time.

Less poetic but nonetheless powerful on its own is a quote attributed to General George S. Patton; you might recognize it as it was spoken by George C. Scott at the end of the movie about the general:

““For over a thousand years Roman conquerors returning from the wars enjoyed the honor of triumph, a tumultuous parade. In the procession came trumpeteers, musicians and strange animals from conquered territories, together with carts laden with treasure and captured armaments. The conquerors rode in a triumphal chariot, the dazed prisoners walking in chains before him. Sometimes his children robed in white stood with him in the chariot or rode the trace horses. A slave stood behind the conqueror holding a golden crown and whispering in his ear a warning: that all glory is fleeting.”

Donald Trump  doesn’t seem to be the kind of person who would know who Percy Bysshe Shelley was (it has been widely reported that he seldom reads anything, even his daily security reports—there have been stories that staff members dumb them down for his short attention span) and while it would not be surprising to learn that he did see the Patton movie, he likely is incapable of understanding that all of his efforts to immortalize himself will someday be nothing more than the equivalent of a pile of ancient stones in the desert of history, an ancient 21^st Century Ozymandias.

(Image credits: Statue—Society of Classical Poets; Trump Library—Youtube)