Man
Be Not Proud
Pride is considered as one of the
seven deadly sins. It does not behove any man to be proud of his power.
The Bible says: Dust thou are and to
dust you shall return.”
According to the English poet Lord
Byron(1788-1824) man is : Half dust, half deity, alike unfit to sin or soar.
The American author Nathaniel Hawthorne
(1804-64} felt : When a man is a brute,
he is the most sensual and loathsome of all brutes.
The English Poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744
) describes man as : The glory, jest and riddle of the world.
History tells us that If a man is proud ,vain, arrogant, conceited, haughty , boastful,
insolent, supercilious, pompous, overbearing, egoistic or disdainful, he loses his
glory and becomes detestable.
Here is relevant poem “ Ozymandias” by the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822).
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.”
Ozymandias
was Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II (Died
1213 BC). He was popularly known as Ramesses the Great. The word pharaoh was then
the title of the rulers of ancient Egypt.
The
moral of the poem is the tragic fall of arrogant kings who rule like dictators.
Their rule is always transitory. Ultimately they vanish and leave this message
for their successors:
“Look on my works ye Mighty, and
despair!
********
G.R.Kanwal
23 May 2025
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