The frailty of life and the futility of love are the central threads though Shelley’s Ozymandias and Cummings’ Ponder. By providing such a realistic, contemporary and personified image of Time’s dominance, both authors seek to refute idealism in attempt to study the permanence of art, a seemingly ironic concept. The poems describe a simple situation: A man and a woman regard the ancient statues as the man urges them to seize the day before they are ruined like the statues before them. Besides the subject, the links between Shelley and Cummings are numerous. Shelley’s archaic language and unfinished sentence structure reflect the irony of time and situation. Similarly, Cumming’s typography and playful tone reveal his parody of love through jarring juxtapositions. Their message is simple: Time in inescapable; yet time can either dilute greatness or provide an excuse for copulation.
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