A commentary on “Ozymandias” and “Metaphors of Terror”

Abstract

Historians are engaged in a constant endeavor to find patterns of meaning that could lend us some understanding of human life. Indeed, history is recurrent, and it is fascinating to see how literature can grasp this recurrence, or the universal features of our human past and our human nature, showing us how we and the events that we participate in all fit into a prototype established long, long ago. In this sense, literature merges with historiography unraveling the archetypical meanings that not only dress our past but also foretell its cyclical comebacks. Who would think that a poem, ‘Ozymandias’ (http://www.yoga.com/raw/readings/Ozymandias), published in 1818, almost two hundred years ago, would strike us now in the twenty-first century with the metaphorical predictability of the tragic events that overtook the world in the second half of 2001?