My Name Is Ozymandias, King of Kings, And I Am Pissed About That Poem.
Let me start by saying: Not a fan.
Can we talk about the title?
My name is Ramesses II. Save your white-dude colonizer name, Ozy-whats-ias, for someone else. Here’s a little thing you should know about Kings. We pick our own names. Here’s a little thing about Kings Of Color: we don’t like being white-washed by little silver-spoon, English boarding-school brats. It’s kind of a pet-peeve we have.
Yeah, I’m looking at you, Shelley. (By the way, your child-bride was a better writer.)
There are so many things wrong about this ‘sonnet’ (sonnet? more like ‘hit piece’) that I won’t even mention the bush-league rhyming scheme. ABABA CDCEDEFEF??? Are we just throwing away the classic octave-sestet structure? Give. Me. A. Break. Yeah, thats right, I’m literary AF.
‘I met a traveller from an antique land…’
‘Who met this ‘traveller’ (misspelled, but whatever)? Are you writing as yourself or some other pillaging Brit? And this ‘traveller’? What’s his name? Why is he traveling? What antique land? Stop being coy and just say it was ‘Gary from Macedonia’ or whatever. My point is this: Is this a reliable narrator? Can we trust anything about this poem? Did he ever even exist? I’m thinking, no, nope and probably not.
