On Seeing the Elgin Marbles

Viewing the famous Elgin Marbles makes the speaker acutely aware of his own relative insignificance and the burden of his mortality. These sculptures, which once decorated the Parthenon temple in Athens, have continued to exist over countless human lifetimes, surviving millennia of conflict and natural disasters (See: Background). The Elgin Marbles represent something that is no longer human but “godlike” (Line 4), and thus serve as a kind of memento mori for the speaker, that is, a reminder that “[he] must die” (Line 4). In comparison to the enduring beauty of the sculptures, the speaker feels weak and small. Indeed, the speaker introduces this feeling of weakness in the very first words of the poem: “My spirit is too weak” (Line 1). The sight of the sculptures causes the speaker to feel “mortality” (Line 1) that “weighs heavily” (Line 2); he compares this weight to an “unwilling sleep” (Line 2), evoking the idea of a natural process that is beyond one’s control but that is also inevitable.

Yet even the Elgin Marbles are not immortal. They show signs of damage brought about by many centuries of wear. This sight only reminds the speaker of his own mortality even more: He questions how such ancient sculptures are subject to time and how much more a single individual must be weighed down by their own mortality.