...The Irony of Ozymandias Percy Bysshe Shelley’s sonnet metered iambic pentameter, “Ozymandias,” contains three types of irony, which are used in combination to ultimately present the overall themes that are developed throughout the poem (PoemShape). The three different types of iron include: verbal, situational, and dramatic. Ozymandias refers to the ancient King of Egypt Rameses II, who is said to have been one of the most powerful Pharaohs in the history of Egypt. Shelley decided to write the poem once he heard of the finding of the ancient remnants, which belonged to this once great Egyptian civilization. The poem is essentially about a very powerful man, whose power was short lived as nature prevailed over man. The beginning lines of the poem tell of a speaker that is told a story by a traveller that is visiting an “antique land”, which is ancient Egypt. The sand and desert gives a visual of the setting and country. The traveller describes the sighting of the “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone” that stand in the desert with a “half sunk” crumbling stone head lies near them in the sand. This paints a picture of a sculpture that has greatly decayed over a long time being exposed to harsh environmental elements. The large figure of Ozymandias is missing his face that is laying half buried in the sand near by. The detached head of Ozymandias has a “shattered visage” that indicates the king’s confused power. The “sneer of cold command” on the statue’s face tells...
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...OZYMANDIAS (Percy Bysshe Shelley) I met a traveler 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. Analysis of Ozymandias "Ozymandias" is a fourteen-line, iambic pentameter sonnet. It is not a traditional one, however. Although it is neither a Petrarchan sonnet nor a Shakespearean sonnet, the rhyming scheme and style resemble a Petrarchan sonnet more, particularly with its 8-6 structure rather than 4-4-4-2. Here we have a speaker learning from a traveler about a giant, ruined statue that lay broken and eroded in the desert. The title of the poem informs the reader that the subject is the 13th-century B.C. Egyptian King Ramses II, whom the Greeks called “Ozymandias.” The traveler describes the great work of the sculptor, who was able to capture the king’s “passions” and give meaningful expression to the stone, an otherwise “lifeless thing.” The “mocking hand” in line 8 is that of the sculptor,...
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...Analysis of “Ozymandias” The poem “Ozymandias” is considered one of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s best sonnets. It was written in 1817 and is still recognized today as its meaning still holds true. “Ozymandias” illustrates the fall of power and mortality through a once powerful king. This is shown through the pride of the king, the tyranny that the king ruled by, and the transience of his ruling and empire. The king Ozymandias has a great amount of pride for what he has accomplished during his time as ruler. He had a sculptor erect a massive statue of him, which shows how highly he thought of himself. The pedestal of the statue stated "My name is Ozymandias king of kings: / Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" (Shelley, 136, 10-11). This shows that he believed he was the most powerful and accomplished king of all time. This extreme sense of pride and power tend to make people think that they are invincible and can continue their way of living forever. That is what the main theme of "Ozymandias" is trying to refute. No matter the amount of power or things one has accomplished, it will all eventually come to an end. The poems name “Ozymandias” was also another name for the pharaoh Ramesses II (Stephans, 161). This goes along with the theme of the poem well because Ramesses II was referred to as the greatest pharaoh during the Egyptian Empire. Ramesses also had a statue of him built with the encryption “ I am Ozymandias, king of kings; if any would know how great I am, and where...
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...A Shattered Visage: Modernity and its visual role in Shelley's Ozymandias Barring some unforeseen individual circumstance, you can always count on your eyesight as one of your primary avenues of perception. This has always been the case for mankind, our gift of vision has allotted us the ability to reproduce images of the world around us in our own right. We can craft a version of the world entirely out of our minds. We have created billion dollar industries on the reproduction and sale of images and effectively monetized one of the most basic forms of perception. But what if vision, something we like to swear by in our media-saturated society, doesn't work the same ways at the same times? Does the experience of looking at the Mona Lisa in 1814 differ from looking at it in the year 2014? Did the Sistine Chapel mean something completely different to someone first seeing it as opposed to someone seeing it on some tour in the present day? The two pieces I chose to discuss deal with these questions a lot. Percy Bysshe Shelley's seminal sonnet “Ozymandias” deals with a traveler looking at the remains of a massive statue and empire hundreds, if not thousands of years later. Jonathan Crary's “Modernity and the Problem of the Observer” deals with how our modes of visual perception have changed drastically from the pre-industrial era into the digital age, where the infinite replication of images is the norm. In marrying commentary on both of these literary artifacts, I will attempt...
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...Departing Death The speakers of Out, Out-, Dulce et Decorum Est and Ozymandias express a particular relationship to the deceased. The writers from each poem allow the speaker to analyze death from their own experiences throughout life. Within the three poems, each has a different extension of the deceased, grief and death that allows for multiple comparisons of the meaning of existence. In the poem Out, Out-, the speaker has a very close relationship with the deceased. The poem begins with the speaker laboring beside the boy just before the boy’s sister tells them “supper,” implying that the speaker has a close relationship with the characters in the poem. The following lines from the poem hint that the speaker is in fact the boy’s father, “His sister stood beside them in her apron/ To tell them ‘Supper.’” (126). As the poem progresses, the boy’s hand gets cut off from the saw. The speaker and the boy’s sister rush him to a doctor, where the boy would eventually bleed to death leaving the family in shock and disbelief. In the final two lines, the remaining family decides to continue on with their lives, “No more to build on there. And they, since they/ Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.” (127). The speaker of Out, Out- displays a clear and simple reaction to grief and death in the final lines of the poem. The speaker’s son dies toward the end of the poem. As a father, this is a devastating loss to him and to his family. The speaker is shocked and couldn’t...
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...“Ozymandias” By Percy Bysshe Shelley “ Ozymandias” is a poem about a statue of a fallen king that has been eroded by the sand and natural desert. The theme of this poem is nature of power. Shelly uses a few sound devices to help convey the theme of his poem and keep it more enticing and helps provide it strength. The first sound device I noticed was the iambic pentameter. He used two forms of this in his poem, abab, acdc,edefef. Shelly did not follow the pattern of a usual sonnet. He should have keep with the pattern of abab but instead changed it to be original and unique and to have power of his poem. Just like Ozymandia, who had power over all of Egypt. I found alliteration in lines 13 and 14 of the poem. This alliteration helps convey the theme of power of nature. Some examples of this are “boundless and bare” and “lone and level”. It shows that where this statue once stood, due to the nature of power, no longer stands. Its level to the ground and bare of any meaning. There is also irony present in this poem. On the statue is written how mighty Ozymandia is and how he proclaimed himself as the King of kings. The king boasts about how well he is but in the last two lines of the poem Shelly gives us the bleak reality of what it really is like now. “Nothing beside remains. Round the decay/Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare/The lone and level sands stretch far away.” Images and symbols are also represented in the poem Shelly wrote. The statue itself is one of the...
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...conten < “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” “England in 1819” ------------------------------------------------- “Ozymandias” Summary The speaker recalls having met a traveler “from an antique land,” who told him a story about the ruins of a statue in the desert of his native country. Two vast legs of stone stand without a body, and near them a massive, crumbling stone head lies “half sunk” in the sand. The traveler told the speaker that the frown and “sneer of cold command” on the statue’s face indicate that the sculptor understood well the emotions (or "passions") of the statue’s subject. The memory of those emotions survives "stamped" on the lifeless statue, even though both the sculptor and his subject are both now dead. On the pedestal of the statue appear the words, “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” But around the decaying ruin of the statue, nothing remains, only the “lone and level sands,” which stretch out around it. Form “Ozymandias” is a sonnet, a fourteen-line poem metered in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme is somewhat unusual for a sonnet of this era; it does not fit a conventional Petrarchan pattern, but instead interlinks the octave (a term for the first eight lines of a sonnet) with the sestet (a term for the last six lines), by gradually replacing old rhymes with new ones in the form ABABACDCEDEFEF. Commentary This sonnet from 1817 is probably Shelley’s most famous and most anthologized poem—which...
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...his surroundings. The man wishes that he had better looks, was more hopeful, and had more freedom. He feels like God is not hearing his pleas for a better life but when he thinks of the one he loves, the speaker would not trade his love for all the money in the world. In lines 10-12, Shakespeare uses a metaphor to compare his love to the lark who sings songs to the heavens. He uses this metaphor to show the reader how happy the thought of this love makes him feel. Ozymandias: Shelley portrays the ruins of Ozymandias as something that barely still stands. One example of this is in lines 3-4. By doing this, Shelley is trying to get across a clear and powerful message to the reader that regardless of how influential and powerful a leader may be during their time as ruler, they will not last forever and their time will eventually come when they will fall. This shattered sculpture of the once mighty Ozymandias also represents the certain decay of civilization. All that's left of the once mighty and powerful Ozymandias is now shattered remains. On My First Son: In this poem, the author uses tone to show how he feels about the loss of his only son. Various tones such as anger, forgiveness, and loving are used throughout the piece. Line 5 shows the authors anger caused by the loss of his son. This is saying that he is losing his fatherhood, and his need to mourn like a father. In line 7 the poem shifts to forgiving, when the author mentions how his son won't have to go through all...
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...U3_FT1.3: ‘Ozymandias!’ ‘Ozymandias’ is a poem written by famed romantic era poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. As a poet, Shelley’s works were never truly recognized during his lifetime due to the extreme discomfort the generation had with his political radicalism, or his revolutionary ideology. It was only after his death that his works were further examined for the masterpieces they are and the way Shelley thought about revolutionary movements was finally revealed. The Romantic Era in England was a reaction to the stuffy, undemocratic, narrow-minded Enlightenment Era of the 1700s. Towards the end of the 1700s, people began to question the belief that their century was a ‘perfect era’ (as those intellectuals of the time called it) and the Romantic Era grew out of this backlash. Pioneers of the Romantic period, like Shelley, wanted to break away from the conventions of the Age of Enlightenment and make way for individuality and experimentation, an imperative ideology of the Romantic Era. Shelley magnified the importance and beauty of nature and love. This was mainly because of the industrial revolution, which had shifted life from the peaceful, serene countryside towards the chaotic cities, transforming man's natural order. Nature was not only appreciated for its visual beauty, but also revered for its ability to help the urban man find his true identity. While the poetry of the time is typified by lyrical ballads reflecting nature and beauty, revolutionary ideas are an underlying theme...
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...Ozymandias was a very interesting poem to read. I had to go over it a couple of times to actually meaning. due to the clever implementation of metaphor, imagery and syntax and incorporated in to it. It was equally very confusing, due the choice of words by the author which at times had me questioning the purpose of some of the words For instance, I moticed that in the line "shattered, wrinkled, sneer, frown, mocked, boundless happens to be diction. The author used enjamSyntax whcih can be seen in the line . I met a ttraveller from an antique land who said: two vast and trunkless legs of stone. Further more, to accentuate the emperors power, by using exclamation points to demonstrate the strict identity of ozymandias. Also, a rough...
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...Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley is a poem about a statue of a king that has been eaten away by the elements of a desert. The great glory of the once-king is displayed in such a way that there is nothing to be prideful about, but the statue still sits with the same magnificence that it did when it had first been erected. With the use of sound devices, Shelley paints a picture of something great left to ruins as time passes. The rhyming scheme of the poem is not one which fits into any standard sonnet pattern. The scheme of ababacdcedefef helps connect the words of each line, creating a bigger, stronger picture of what the Shelley wrote about. The last word in line 1 and line 3 rhyme (land/sand), and when the poem is read aloud, it becomes clear that the land being spoken of is a desert. These rhyme-connections follow throughout the poem. Another example of the rhyme-connection is line 11 and line 13, with the words despair and bare. These two words read within the rhyming scheme gives a better understanding of the feelings of despair now that everything that Ozymandias' once greatness has eroded with time. Alliteration is the most important sound device in the poem. Alliteration is coloured all throughout the poem. From the first example of “cold command” to the last of “sands stretch”, each piece of alliteration puts a hard emphasize of each line. Within the context of the first example (“wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command”), the hardness of the C puts a strain of...
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...contradictory themes of human nature--as a person gets older, their wish to live forever only grows deeper; they become desperate as they find a way, any way, to be able to defeat death and live generations into the future. Age is inevitable, and immortality is unachievable. It is for this reason that everyone rejects their old age and are eager to embrace the ideas of life past death. Many people chase power in pursuit of immortality, but many people do not realize time eventually erases everything. Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias” highlights the power of time as a traveler visits the ruins of Ozymandias, a great king of the past who is now forgotten. All that is left of his legacy is a broken statue that reads, “‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’” (11), in which the speaker then comments, “nothing beside remains” (12). This...
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...Sonnet 55 and Ozymandias Comparison Sonnet 55 is one of the most popular and critically acclaimed poems in the English language. It is one of a 154 series of sonnets written by Shakespeare. Though it is not confirmed who it is exactly the sonnet is directed at, we know that it is most likely a love interest or his best friend at the time. Ozymandias is another sonnet, written by Percy Bysshe Shelley. This poems name, Ozymandias, was a Greek name for the Egyptian Pharaoh, Rameses II. Sonnet 55 is a poem about a great love, or best friend of Shakespeare’s. According to many critics and readers, it is about time and immortalization. The poem directly begins with some words of assurance to his lover; no other memorials, however beautiful or permanent, can outdo this sonnet, which will live longer and shine brighter. He’s saying that that the rest of the world has to deal with war and other tragedies but this sonnet will escape both these. The purpose of his writings were to express his emotions and compassion for the person he loves (“But you shall shine more bright in these contents than unswept stone besmear’d with sluttish time” Lines 3-4). He also wanted to show how immortality can be obtained through stories or poetry (“The living record of your memory. ‘Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity” Lines 8-9). This poem is 14 lines long, and follows the rhyme scheme; abab, cdcd, efef. It also has an iambic parameter; “So till the judgment that yourself arise, You live in this,...
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...the study of history, philosophy, and arts as a way to warn or foreshadow those would be rulers or societies of the danger of arrogance. Ozymandias, by his own admission, thought of himself as the “king of kings” and believed that his memory would transcend time itself. His form of government, monarchy, is a long running institution; some kings are better remembered than others. Ozymandias is the symbol of political power and government, which is not considered to be part of the humanities. The author of this poem intentionally leaves the symbol of the political power in pieces demonstrating how the idea of political power can be unmemorable. Shelley furthers this idea by having the narrator three degrees removed from ever seeing the statue. The setting of the remains of the statue is in a barren desert wasteland where no form of life can be sustained. Ozymandias’ rule was over as soon as he died and any memory of his accomplishments while in office died soon after. The only thing that remained of Ozymandias and his rule was the statue itself along with words that had been inscribed on the statue itself. The two studies of language and art can be seen as symbols in this poem. Shelley made a point to highlight that humanities can go beyond the concept of time as we know it. This can be further seen in the aspect that no one knew what Ozymandias did to deserve a statue, other than him being a king. His legacy and any power he held during his reign was infinitesimal compared to how...
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...Ozmandias 1. What kind of man was the Pharaoh Ozymandias, do you think? Quote from the poem to substantiate your answer. I think that Pharaoh Ozymandias was a strong and powerful ruler in this “ancient land” that the traveler refers to. The phrase “sneer of cold command” suggests he was a dictator and ruled with fear and not well liked by the people he ruled over. In line 11, the plural is used for the word “works”, this suggesting that the king must have had plenty, so thus very wealthy. He also is portrayed at being very arrogant and vain in line 11 “Look at my works, ye mighty, and despair!” where is boasting about his works and telling everyone to look at them and see how mighty he is. Although the inscription at the foot of the statue reveals to us who this poem is about, it also shows his idea of his own power calling himself “king of kings”. 2. The poet takes great care to describe, in lines 4 and 5, the ‘passions’ of Ozymandias that are ‘stamped on these lifeless things’ (line 7). What is the effect of the juxtaposition of ‘passions’ and ‘lifeless’? What is Shelley suggesting about human ambition? The passions of Ozymandias that are described in lines 4 and 5 “frown, wrinkled lip and sneer” show the type of leader he was that put fear into those he ruled and looked at his subjects as if they were unworthy. And then the use of the phase “stamped on these lifeless things” is saying that those passions is all that is left behind on the statue. The...
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