Carpe Diem's ​​message to Ozymandias Are you looking at the clock on the wall? Can't wait for class to end? Maybe you should slow down and enjoy the present. Ozymandias learns a hard lesson about enjoying time. “Ozymandias” is a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley in which the king of kings, Ozymandias, learns that time must be experienced in the present and that once it has passed, there is no way to get it back. At the beginning of this poem, Shelley writes of a narrator recounting an encounter with a man from an ancient country. “I met a traveler from an ancient country” already places you in time. Starting with “I” as in the present, but then taking a step back in time by introducing a traveler from the past. It is obvious that the traveler is an elderly person because of the word "antique" in his description. The entire first line of the poem gives a change of tense from present to past. After this change in tense, the traveler immediately speaks of his past experience, taking the text even further. Its story concerns a sculpture by Ozym...