Hopeless

If you look to the Romantic Era, often you will hear the Percy Bysshe Shelley. And if you look into his works, you'll probably come across the short yet to the point poem of his titled  Ozymandias.

The poem describes talking to a traveler who came upon two huge legs of stone stuck in the sand with the words inscribed saying, "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

This dramatic sonnet brings about a feeling of irony as it's talking about something that was once so grande and was thought to never become forgotten, yet over the years it's decayed and washed away in history. In our lives today, everyone seems to believe that they'll be remembered forever, and yet so often we'll go the way of of this once great king.

The description that Shelley gives of the surrounding areas around the statue leaves a feeling of loss and abandonment that at some point we're all bound to go through. It also shows the desolation that now surrounds something that was once a great and terrible thing. And to portray this he ends the poem by saying,

"Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away."