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Friday, March 19, 2004

Ode to Shelley 

I don't really like Shelley, the Romantic period, or even poetry in general for that matter, but this rather extreme statment is probably just due to a few personal inhibitions that I have. I know deep down that poetry is a good thing, on the whole. For example, there is one poem that I studied by Shelley that I keep coming back to again and again because it's just so...useful. Of course, everytime I feel the need to use it, I find that I'm using it in a different way, to describe a different phenomena. The eternal theme, however, remains the same...

Ozymandias
by 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 shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command      
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d 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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It's 5:30 something in the morning here in Nakameguro, and as I sit here, typing these words, I'm waiting for things to start blowing up in Tokyo.

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