A tyrant brought down to earth
Ozymandias

As Saddam’s statue lies shattered in the Baghdad dust, a sonnet written nearly 200 years ago best sums up the fall of the vainglorious tyrant. Percy Bysshe Shelley was inspired to write Ozymandias by the broken colossus of Pharaoh Rameses II in Egypt, but the poem stands today as fitting epitaph for Saddam’s rule and its wrecked idols:

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 shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things.
The hand that mocked 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.