Bring Back Big Families

I’m still thinking a lot lately about death, about what we leave behind, and how all of it weaves into this wild, beautiful thing we call dad life. Two poems keep surfacing in my mind for my own hypothetical funeral: John Donne’s Death Be Not Proud (read my reflection on it here) and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias. Since I already ruminated over Donne’s poem, let’s visit the second one.

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Ozymandias

By Percy Bysshe Shelley

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.

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This is perhaps the closest thing English literature has to a perfect poem. In fourteen lines, Shelley delivers a devastating truth: time wins. Every empire, every achievement we chase, every monument we build eventually crumbles to dust. The king’s arrogant inscription becomes ironic in the emptiness around it.

When I teach this to my senior students, I always pair it with a video that hits hard.

The reading at the end, delivered with a poignancy matched only by the verses Shelley puts forth, underscores how fleeting power and pride and our time really are. Yet that same finality makes the poem strangely life-affirming. It urges us to use our brief time well, to do something truly lasting, something meaningful.

Here’s to Ozymandias, to Shelley’s unflinching gaze, to Dr. Paul Kalanithi, who faced his own mortality with courage while cherishing his wife and young daughter, and to every parent who chooses to pour their finite days into something eternal.

Truly, nothing beside remains . . . except what we give away.