One night last week I was watching a news program that was showing pictures of the ruins of the many giant statues of Saddam Hussein that dotted the urban landscape of Iraq before the recent war. And suddenly it came to me. Of course, the desert ruins of the statue of "Ozymandias." What could be better this week than Shelley's classic poetic depiction of the ephemeral nature of fame and power?

I have mixed feelings about Shelley. I have cherished many of his poems since I was in high school and decided that I would be a famous fiction writer someday and "Drive my dead thoughts over the universe, Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!", as Shelley put it so deftly in his "Ode to the West Wind."

And I can accept the fact that he was a radical, selfish, nasty, immature, immoral brat who ruined the lives of many people who loved him, and who used his God-given genius to promote socialist nonsense and atheism. Many poets whose work I enjoy were dreadful individuals. And he did, after all, live during a period when a sensitive, intelligent, curious and energetic youth could understandably have been attracted to the newly minted promises of socialism and driven to ponder the timeless question of how a loving God could foist on mankind the kinds of horrors that attended the industrial revolution in England and the Napoleonic wars in Europe.

Nevertheless, Shelley's personal and poetic legacy is a terribly destructive one. In fact, I was amazed the first time I visited the poet's corner in Westminster Abbey and saw the name of this arrogant advocate of atheism engraved on the wall of such a sacred place. I wondered, had no one associated with the Abbey ever read Shelley's "Queen Mab" and the blathering "Notes" that accompany it; that pretentious and shallow screed against God, religion, marriage, morals, the concept of sin, and everything else deemed decent by society in his day? "I brought my daughter RELIGION, on earth: She smothered Reason's babes in their birth . . . ." But what do I know? He was a great poet, and it is, after all, a poet's corner.

Anyway, I have always liked this particular poem by this most political of poets. May his troubled soul rest peacefully now.