Making it up with Shelley
The English tutor was away and it might have been reasonable to have expected that the class would be dismissed upon being marked present. The departmental head was not happy with such an arrangement, and handed out passages of poetry on which we were to comment. It seemed unjust; poetry was bad enough without being presented with previously unseen material. I received a copy of Shelley’s Ozymandias:
…I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them,