Ashley kisses his forehead a second time, smiles and says, "I've stopped trusting your parents about what you want for your wedding! Is there anything you particularly want?"

"If I can have my friends there, I'm happy." 

"All right. I should have pushed harder for the wedding to be farther in the future, many of my friends live overseas."

He makes a sympathetic sound and moves closer to Ashley. 

"On the other hand, maybe it's a good thing that my wedding guests don't include the prince of Thule."

"...should I ask how you know the prince of Thule?" 

"It is a hilarious story which you can hear on my deathbed. Or after we're married if you ask very nicely."

"I'll make sure to ask nicely, then." He has to stand on tiptoe to kiss Ashley's cheek. 

"--I'd like to get to know you before we get married but I don't know what sort of questions to ask. Your mother mentioned something about a poetry society?"

Lindsay debates for a moment how much about the Society to tell him, then says, "Yes. That's where I met nearly all of my friends." 

"I don't know anything about poetry, unless you count sea shanties, which I don't think you should. Tell me about it?"

"I don't quite know how to talk about it? But —" 

Abruptly his bearing changes; he's still using submissive body language, but he looks — less unsure. 

"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 shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd 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." 

He speaks like every word is precious. 

He's quiet for a bit afterward. Thoughtful.

"It's sad," he says finally, "but it's beautiful."

"It is." 

"Who wrote it?"

"Percy Shelley." 

"What do you think of the poem?"

"It's — my friend's favorite. He likes it because he generally likes large grandiose poetry; I like it because — there's a lot to be said about how Anglia is built on the bones of Rome, and this poem says it better than most others I've read." 

"It's wrong though. Anglia is not a colossal wreck. Anglia is its own country with its own genius, not-- a shade of Rome."

"Not that Anglia is the wreck. But our country is full of things that the Romans thought would last forever, and they didn't; it's a caution, not a criticism." 

"I'm not sure the analogy works though. I think it's more like-- the statue fell apart and then we used one of the legs to build a house and the other to build a temple and children play on the head. Maybe statues are grander and more noble than houses and temples and places for children to play, but those things are good too."

He nods seriously. "But 'Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!' is still a deeply arrogant thing to say; if nobody now made similar claims I'd read it completely differently, and with the bit about the sneer of cold command it's even more transparently about arrogance — that this person's arrogance is the only thing surviving of him. It's partially about Anglia but it's not just about Anglia." 

"I know it sounds like it's about an empire but it seems like you could also interpret it as being about-- a person? One of those people who is very proud of being an admiral but a decade after they retire no one remembers the names of any of the battles they've won."

He nods again. "I'm not quite as familiar with the phenomenon, I don't think, but yes, you could." 

— fuck, did that sound like he was implying Ashley was one of those people? He hopes it didn't.