Do you understand the poetry of Percy Shelley?

Ben has always been agile in understanding poetry and philosophy. Because he’s my son, I am always curious about what interests him. A few years ago, Ben gave me a purse-sized journal. Inside the front cover is a poem by Percy Shelley. Ben introduced the poem with these words: “This is my favorite poem.”

Poetry, it seems to me, is like Michelangelo explained his process of finding David in a stand of white marble. I’m taking literary liberty when I suggest that Michelangelo said he simply removed everything that wasn’t the form he was exposing. Sort of “freed” the sculpture of David from the Italian marble. The best poems – seem to free something in the reader too. This poem – that I found in the journal that Ben gave me – a few years ago – has freed something in me today. I wonder what it frees in Ben – and to you too. Why was it his favorite poem a few years ago?

I have several journals ongoing simultaneously. I write in this journal about 8-18 times a year. I think of it as a special moments journal. I’ve only filled the first quarter of the book – in the last few years! I imagine someday Ben will be reading this journal. I wanted to give him something worth spending his precious time reading. It’s not like the journals I use to sort out my thinking, or savor my feelings, or ponder a thought like starlight. No, this journal is my “Turning Points Journal”.

Turning Points: those moments in your life when we see life – as if we’d step out of the flow – and allow the impressions of the moment to shape us. Like a Monterey Pine Tree is shaped into poetic sculpture by the wind and moisture – we are shaped by the natural forces we encounter. Some forces we allow to shape us; some forces shape us unaware.

So today I picked up the Turning Points Journal – and prepared to write in it – and noticed Ben’s writing on the inside cover of the journal. I don’t remember seeing that poem before today. But I must have – and I must have forgotten it – someplace before the last turning point.

I wondered for quite a while – what this poem meant to Ben when he wrote it a few years ago – and what it might mean to him now. It’s a turning point moment for me – so I’ll add that to the turning point that brought me to the journal today.

What does this Percy Shelly poem say to you?

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 it’s 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.