[gniewkoit]

It's from a fragment of a poem he never finished, which his wife published under the title "To the moon" The words are slightly different from what you remember:

Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,
And ever changing, like a Joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?

Beautiful.
Thanks podalangai.

How did you get on with Ozymandias?

Must say we are not the best of friends
My strained relationship with Shelley can be attributed to the fact I was introduced to his poems in school. So I had to approach them with dread that I had to be prepared to paraphrase and innocent looking couplet. Plus something like Ozymandias so easily lends the teacher an opportunity to go on a didactic tangent. Immaterial whether the poet wanted to get moral.

While I have never had problems with didactism in Tamil, in English I was cynic just too early. Thinking about it, it is perhaps founded on some deep-rooted impression that Tamil is much more naive a language/culture. Till date naive's equivalent in Tamil is almost a compliment.

Actually, I had a similar difficulty when I encountered Shelley in middle school - the problem was that his poems are long, and definitely not modern in tone, which means it is often hard work at the start.

The verses you quote are indeed the ones that stand-out in Ode to a Skylark