Thursday, April 12, 2018

"Lovely to See You"

The bridge of "Lovely to See You" has some resemblance to Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem "Ozymandias."  In the liner notes, the bridge of "Lovely to See You" is rendered as:
Tell us what you've seen in faraway forgotten lands
Where empires have turned back to sand.
Although, appropriate to their being "forgotten," the "lands" is cut off:


The "empires... turn[ing] back to sand" is the same image as Shelley's once-vast domain that has since "decay[ed]" so that only "lone and level sands" and fragments of a statue remain.

There really isn't anything else in "Lovely to See You" that seems connected to "Ozymandias," but between the same image of "empires... turn[ing] back to sand" and the land(s)/sand rhyme (which is also in "Ozymandias"), I think Shelley's poem might have influenced "Lovely to See You," if only slightly.