On the Vanity of Earthly Greatness -- Arthur Guiterman

Following on from Ozymandias...

(Poem #24) On the Vanity of Earthly Greatness The tusks which clashed in mighty brawls Of mastodons, are billiard balls. The sword of Charlemagne the Just Is Ferric Oxide, known as rust. The grizzly bear, whose potent hug, Was feared by all, is now a rug. Great Caesar's bust is on the shelf, And I don't feel so well myself. -- Arthur Guiterman

A refreshingly humorous spin on the subject - the punchline drops into place
neatly. Guiterman has written a number of vaguely Nashish poems, of which
this is probably the most famous - personally, the only other things I'd
heard of his were the following fragment:

  Of all cold words of tongue or pen
  The worst are these: "I knew him when--"
        -Arthur Guiterman, 'Prophets in Their Own Country'

and, From Richard Lederer's 'Adventures of a Verbivore' (good book, btw):

  "It's not true that no words rhyme with orange . . . However, there was a
  man -- I'm not kidding -- named Henry Honeychurch Gorringe.  He was a naval
  commander who in the midnineteenth century oversaw the transport of
  Cleopatra's Needle to New York's Central Park.  Pouncing on this event, the
  poet Arthur Guiterman wrote:

        In Sparkhill buried lies a man of a mark
        Who brought the Obelisk to Central Park,
        Redoubtable Commander H. H. Gorringe,
        Whose name supplies the long-sought rhyme for orange.

  So orange is rhymable."

He does not appear to have led the world's most interesting life either -
some dedicated websearching turned up the  following, which for lack of a
better name I'll call a

Biographical Note:

  Guiterman, Arthur, American poet, 1871-1943.

Martin