This Poetry Pairing features the classic Percy Bysshe Shelley poem "Ozymandias" and the Op-Ed "Goodbye, Lenin?" by Sasha Senderovich. Legendary English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned at the age of 29. His wife, Mary Shelley, authored "Frankenstein." This week's poem, "Ozymandias," was featured in the television show "Breaking Bad." Ozymandias By Percy Bysshe Shelley 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. In "Goodbye, Lenin?," Sasha Senderovich writes about the symbolic destruction of statues of political leaders, and specifically about the statue of Vladimir Lenin that had stood in the Ukrainian capital city of Kiev. On Sunday, during the protests in Kiev against President Viktor Yanukovich, the statue of Lenin was pulled down from its pedestal in front of Besarabsky market. It had been vandalized several days before and had since been guarded by the riot police. The nationalist party Svoboda took responsibility for the act. Yuri Syrotiuk, the party's press secretary and a member of Parliament, called it, "the end of the Soviet occupation and the beginning of the final decolonization of Ukraine." In this interpretation, Lenin is the symbol of Ukraine being brutally integrated into the Soviet Union in the wake of World War I and then starved by the collectivization policies of his successor, Stalin. Lenin also stands for contemporary Russia, whose effort to pull Ukraine more firmly into its sphere of influence - by forcing Mr. Yanukovich not to sign a political and free trade agreement with the European Union - was the spark for the current protests. ...Online, commentators from around the world have been quick to liken the fall of Lenin in Kiev on Sunday to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989; now, like then, the protesters chipped at both symbolic structures and hauled away bits as souvenirs. But nearly a quarter-century after that event, the comparison seems anachronistically nostalgic. If the promise of a unified Europe rang true in 1989, it seems rather misguided today, given the current economic troubles and rise of right-wing nationalism. A better parallel may be to the collapse of Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad in April 2003. In footage shown around the world, an American soldier placed the star-spangled banner on Saddam's iron face as it came down; the gesture was greeted as a harbinger of Iraq's transition from dictatorship to democracy. On Sunday, protesters in Kiev placed flags of Ukraine and the European Union on Lenin's empty pedestal. ... The granite Lenin of Kiev was already on its way to representing the complexities of both the past and today: It was a reminder of the failure of the Soviet project and of the failure of the liberal economic policies that followed. Having survived two decades since the fall of the Soviet Union, the statue was treated by many residents of Kiev as a potent visual pun. It stood in front of the Besarabsky covered food hall - a structure plastered with glitzy ads for European banks and merchandise - and was dubbed the "Lenin who shows the way to the market." The Poetry Foundation offers a learning guide for "Ozymandias," and an essay on another the work of another poet's connection to "Breaking Bad," Walt Whitman.