Harry Thomas tells a Story from the Teaching Front
Teaching “Ozymandias” in the Valley
I was told by the team leader to teach “Ozymandias” on Friday. I would find the poem on page 57 of The 100 Best Poems of All Time, the insultingly defective anthology with the preposterous title (it includes poems by Robert Service, Ernest Thayer, Alfred Noyes, and Maya Angelou, among the notables) that he and the other three members of the department who had been at the school for a year already had selected for the five sections, two of them mine, of 9th grade English.The week before, in yet another instance of my absence of team spirit, I had asked my students to memorize “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Only three of the 31 students had been able, or had bothered, to learn it, and they and those who had learned at least the first stanza had recited the first line as “Whose woods are these I think I know,” because, I saw too late, that’s how it was printed in the anthology.
I didn’t know what to expect from them on “Ozymandias.” I thought they might need to know the meaning of “antique” (the sons and daughters of affluent suburbanites, they might be misled by “an antique land”), “visage,” or perhaps even “sneer,” and the brighter ones might wonder who Ozymandias was, whether he was a real king, and how and why Shelley had written the poem. Of course, I could teach them something about the different kinds of sonnets, and ask them about the rhyming in Shelley’s sonnet.
As always I started by reading the poem aloud, slowly, letting the phrases and sounds hang in the air, and then asking for questions. A girl to my right, a lifer, a student who had been at the school since pre-school, raised her hand.
“Elizabeth.”
“I have a question. I don’t understand what she means when she says that–”
“I am sorry to interrupt you, Elizabeth, but before we get to your question, please tell us who she is.” The girl looked down at the page, hesitated a moment, then said, “The author.”
“Oh, Percy Bysshe Shelley was a man, not a woman. Percy was a somewhat common name among the English aristocracy. Have you ever seen the movie (I learned early on that, though the students never read anything out of school, this being Los Angeles they did see a lot of movies), The Scarlet Pimpernel? Well, the English aristocrat in the movie, played by the famous actor Leslie Howard—Leslie is also a man’s name—is named Percy.”
“Okay, okay. But what I don’t understand is what she means by…”
“No, no. The poet was a man. Percy is a man’s name.”
“All right. But my question is about why she says…” Laughter percolated in the room. Then, as if to save her, the sweet boy to Elizabeth’s left raised his hand.
“Yes, Daniel.”
“I have a question.”
“Yes, Daniel.”
“What does the poet mean when she says…”
“Daniel! Percy Bysshe Shelley was a man! Percy is a man’s name!” From the back of the room came the booming voice of an enormous girl:
“Give it up, Mr. Thomas. He’s a woman.”
“Well, clearly he is on the way to becoming bisexual.”
At this point I was remembering that scene in Moonstruck when the aged Italian grandfather, sitting at the kitchen table with his bewildering family, lowers head and, his eyes watering, mumbles, “I’m confused.”
I decided to give up on “Ozymandias.”
“Do you know who Shelley’s wife was?” I asked.
A wag at the back: “Joe?”