OZYMANDAIS

I never really was a big poetry fan, though this one caught my imagination. It's by Percy Byshe Shelley and its theme is decay. The clever part of this, however, is that Ozymandais, 'The king of kings, Look on my Works ye mighty and despair' is a decaying statue in the 'desart', and as the work of the sculpture deteriorates and returns to the sand from which it was made so the syntax of the poem breaks up.

In many ways, and this is my take on this poem, this is about the cycle of life and death. Even though the statue was once sculpted for some great and powerful man, it is, nevertheles, rapidly returning to sand. It is, for me, an ashes to ashes work, it is actually a sonnet of fourteen lines, can't remember what type of sonnet that is, but think it is the 'classic' style that Shakespeare worked in, eight lines and then six - they had a name for them which I also forget, sorry - but they were different from Italian sonnets.

I really like the irony however, and, for me, it represents the rise and fall of empires, kings, queens, leaders and so on and reinforces the mortality that we all share, rich, poor, hungry. Shelley's great poem was the one on the Peterloo riots of 1819 and the guy was quite a liberal thinker for his time, a republican to boot, what was it he said about the last king being strangled by the entrails of somebody or other?