My second poem presentation. :)
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Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Biography
Percy Bysshe Shelley (4 August 1792 – 8 July 1822) was one of the major English Romantic poets and is critically regarded among the finest lyric poets in the English language. His classic anthology verse works such as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark and The Masque of Anarchy, are among the most popular and critically acclaimed poems. His major works, however, are long visionary poems which included Prometheus Unbound, Alastor, Adonaïs, The Revolt of Islam, and the unfinished The Triumph of Life. He also wrote dramatic plays and Gothic novels.
Shelley was born at Horsham, Sussex, England, into an aristocratic family. At age of ten, Shelley was sent to Syon House Academy of Brentford. The harsh treatment of instructors and schoolmates rendered his life most unpleasant. Such treatment might have been due to his devotion to reading instead of more solid school work. In 1804, Shelley entered Eton College, where he subjected to an almost daily mob torment his classmates called “Shelley-baits”. Surrounded, Shelley would have his books torn from his hands and his clothes pulled at and torn until he cried out madly in his high-pitched “cracked soprano” of a voice. He also earned the nickname “Mad Shelley” due to his odd behaviour. It was in Eton that Shelley started writing poetry and became intrigued with revolutionary political and philosophical ideas of Thomas Paine and William Godwin.
In 1810, he attended University College, Oxford, though he attended lectures irregularly. Shelley was often seen indulging in his habit of sailing paper boats on the water of any nearby pond or lake, reading with a book held right up to his eyes or lying very close to the fire. He was unpopular with both students and dons. In 1811, Shelley and Thomas Jefferson Hogg wrote a pamphlet called The Necessity of Atheism, which had been sent to the heads of colleges and a number of bishops. This gained the attention of the university administration. As a result, Shelley and Hogg were expelled from Oxford on 25 March 1811. Shelley was given the choice to be reinstated after his father intervened, on the condition that he disavowed the pamphlet. Shelley’s refusal to do so led to a falling-out with his father. In the same year, Shelley eloped and married sixteen year-old Harriet Westbrook. The couple spent two years travelling, distributing pamphlets and speaking against political injustice. Due to his radical activities and writings, Shelley gained the unfavourable attention of the British government.
Unhappy in his marriage, Shelley often left his wife and daughter to visit William Godwin’s home and bookshop in London. He met Godwin’s daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. Shelley had fallen in love with Mary, which upset Harriet and Mary’s father. When the two persuaded Mary to stop seeing Shelley, he showed up distraught and hysterical at her house with laudanum and a pistol, threatening to commit suicide. Shelley then abandoned his pregnant wife and child and eloped with Mary. They travelled around Europe, accompanied by Mary’s sister. Six weeks later they returned to London. In the same year Shelley’s grandfather died, leaving him £1000 per annum. In December 1816, Shelley’s estranged wife Harriet drowned herself in the Serpentine in Hyde Park, London. On 30 December 1816, few weeks after Harriet’s body was recovered, Shelley and Mary Godwin married. In 1818, the Shelleys moved to Italy. Shelley suffered from disturbing recurring nightmares and hallucinations. One was of his good friends Jane and Edward Williams coming into his room, bloody and mangled, to tell him that the house was falling down. When he rushed to Mary’s room to warn her, he found himself strangling her.
During a stormy voyage off the Italian coast, on 8 July 1822, Shelley drowned when his boat sank. The bodies of Shelley, Edward Williams and the boat’s sailor washed ashore ten days later. The bodies were cremated on the beach because of quarantine laws to protect against plague. His heart was given to Mary, who carried it with her in a silken shroud for the rest of her life, and eventually buried in Bournemouth, England. Shelley’s final, unfinished poem was ironically titled The Triumph of Life. His unconventional life and uncompromising idealism and optimism, combined with his strong disapproving voice, made him an authoritative and much-denigrated figure during and after his life. He became an idol for the next few generations of poets. Throughout his life, he emphatically expressed his political and religious views in a struggle against social injustice, often to the point where it got him into trouble. Shelley detested the monarchy and aristocracy and was a great believer in the idea of the power of the human mind to change circumstances for the better in a non-violent way.
Ozymandias
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.
Background of the poem
In late 1817 Shelley and his friend Horace Smith decided to have a sonnet competition. For the subject of their sonnets, Shelley and Smith chose a partially-destroyed statue of Ramses II that was making its way to London from Egypt, finally arriving there sometime early in the year 1818. Shelley published his poem in January 1818 in The Examiner. Smith published his poem less than a month later. While Shelley has a reputation for radical and experimental poetry, “Ozymandias” is a pretty tame poem compared to many of his other works.
Ozymandias was another name for Ramses the Great, Pharaoh of the nineteenth dynasty of ancient Egypt. Ozymandias represents a transliteration into Greek of a part of Ramses throne name, User-maat-re Setep-en-re. He was born in 1314 B.C and ruled Egypt for 66 years. His exact age at death is uncertain, but it was between 90 and 99. Ramses was a warrior king and builder of temples, statues and other monuments. The sonnet paraphrases the inscription on the base of the statue, given by Diodorus Siculus as “King of Kings am I, Ozymandias. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works.” Shelley’s poem is often said to have been inspired by the arrival in London of a colossal statue of Ramses II, acquired for the British Museum by the Italian adventurer Giovanni Belzoni. However, the poem was written and published before the statue arrived in Britain, thus Shelley could not have seen it. But its repute in Western Europe preceded its actual arrival in Britain, and so it may have been its repute or news of its imminent arrival rather than seeing the statue itself which provided the inspiration.
Analysis
Lines 1-8: The poem begins with an encounter between the narrator and a traveller that comes from “an antique land”. The traveller could be a native of this “antique land”, or just a tourist returning from his latest trip. “Antique” means something really old, so the traveller could be coming from a place that is ancient, almost as if he was time-travelling. Or he could just be coming from a place that has an older history. The traveller then begins his story about a pair of stone legs that are still standing in the middle of the desert. Those legs are “vast” and “trunkless”. Trunkless means without a torso, so it’s a pair of legs with no body. “Visage” means face; a face implies a head, so we are being told that the head belonging to this sculpture is partially buried in the sand, near the legs. A “frown”, a “wrinkled lip”, and a “sneer” can be seen on the visage. The sneering conveys the “cold command” of an absolute ruler. We are then introduced to another character, the sculptor. “Read” here means understood or copied well. The sculptor was pretty good because he was able to understand and reproduce the exact facial features and “passions” of the subject of the statue. The poem suggests that artists have the ability to perceive the true nature of other people in the present and not just in the past, with the benefit of hindsight. The statue doesn’t literally speak, but the frown and sneer are so perfectly rendered that they give the impression that they are speaking, telling us how great the sculptor was. The “passions” still survive because they are “stamped on these lifeless things”. The “lifeless things” are fragments of the statue in the desert. “Stamped” refers to the artistic process by which the sculptor inscribed the “frown” and “sneer” on the statue’s face. “Mocked” has two meanings in this passage. It means both “made fun of” and “copied” or “imitated”. “Hand” is a stand-in for the sculptor. So, the sculptor both belittled and copied the passions of the ruler. “The heart that fed” refers to the heart that “fed” or nourished the passions of the man that the statue represents. The passions not only “survive”, they have also outlived both the sculptor (“the hand that mocked”) and the heart of the man depicted by the statue. There is a contrast between life and death. The fragments of the statue are called “lifeless things”, the sculptor is dead and so is the statue’s subject. The “passions” though, still “survive”.
Lines 9-14: The traveller then talks about an inscription at the foot of the statue which finally reveals whom this statue represents: Ozymandias. The inscription suggests that Ozymandias is arrogant, or at least has grand ideas about his own power. He calls himself the “king of kings”. Ozymandias also brags about his “works”, which could represent the numerous colossal statues of him, such as the one described in this poem. From his speech, Ozymandias tells the “mighty” to “despair” because their achievements will never equal his “works”. There is nothing that remains beside the head, legs and pedestal. The statue is also a “colossal wreck”. The very size of the statue (“colossal”) emphasizes the scope of Ozymandias’s ambitions as well. It’s almost as if because he thinks he’s the “king of kings”, he has to build a really big statue. To complement the “decay” of the statue, the traveller describes a desolate and barren desert that seems to go on forever (“sands that stretch far away”). The statue is the only thing in this barren desert. There was probably a temple or something nearby, but it’s long gone. The “sands” are “lone”, which means whatever else used to be beside the statue has been destroyed or buried.
Tone: ironic, sarcastic, pride, mystery, wonder, amazement, loss
Theme of Transience: Ozymandias is obsessed with transience; the very fact that the statue is a “colossal wreck” says clearly that some things don’t last forever. The statue is also a symbol of Ozymandias’s ambition, pride and absolute power, and thus the poem also implies that kingdoms and political regimes will eventually crumble, leaving no trace of their existence except, perhaps, pathetic statues that no longer even have torsos.
Theme of Pride: In the inscription on the pedestal Ozymandias calls himself the “king of kings” while also implying that his “works” – works of art like the statue, pyramids – are the best. Ozymandias thinks pretty highly of himself and of what he’s achieved, both politically and artistically. The fact that he commissions this “colossal” statue with “vast legs” points to his sense of pride, while the statue’s fragmentary state indicates the emptiness (at least in the long term) of Ozymandias’s boast.
Theme of Art and Culture: “Ozymandias” was inspired by a statue, and it’s no surprise that art is one of this poem’s themes. The traveller makes a point of telling us that the statue was made by a really skilled sculptor and the poem as a whole explores the question of art’s longevity. The statue is in part of a stand-in or substitute for all kinds of art (painting, poetry, etc.) and the poem asks us to think not just about sculpture, but about the fate of other arts as well.
Theme of Man and the Natural World: “Ozymandias” describes a statue, and statues are made from rocks and stones found in nature. While the poem explores the way in which art necessarily involves some kind of engagement with the natural world, it also thinks about how nature might fight back.
Language:
Irony: The poem is mainly ironic. One example is the way the statue is constructed. The statue of Ozymandias has a “frown and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command”, which mirrors Ozymandias disdain for the people and his lack of sensitivity. The expression is still alive on the face of the statue, yet the subject of the statue is forgotten. Ozymandias wanted to build a statue of him to glorify himself, yet the sculptor constructed the statue in a manner that discredits Ozymandias, thus the irony. Another example is that Ozymandias once taunted the “mighty” to “despair” at his works. Yet all that is left is the remaining ruins of the King’s statue, surrounded by “the lone and level sands” that “stretch far away”. The contrast between the arrogance of Ozymandias’ words and the seemingly endless emptiness surrounding his “vast and trunkless legs of stone” emphasizes the poem’s irony.
Imagery: There is a great deal of visual imagery in this poem. The first image that we are presented with is that of a traveller from an ancient land, who is seen as an experienced and knowledgeable individual. He tells of the statue in the desert, which is accompanied by the image of the empty desert. Also, we see the image of the sculptor, who created the work. The reader sees subject of the monument to be a cold, brutal leader, but one who still had compassion for his people (“The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed”). The visual imagery of seeing the empty desert may be the most effective way of conveying the meaning of the poem.
Figurative language: The statue of Ozymandias can be a metaphor for political power. It emphasizes that power can become meaningless over passage of time. The statue can also be a metaphor for the pride of all humanity.
Structure: The poem consists mainly of enjambment. The poem contains very long sentences, which is typical of Shelley. The second complete sentence, which starts from line 3, has a lot of separate clauses that resemble complicated Latin sentences from two thousand years ago. This long, central sentence gives the poem an epic feel.
Scansion: Syllabic verse, with 10 syllables in each line. The poem is a mixture of Italian sonnet and Shakespearean sonnet.
Sound Effects: The rhyme scheme is ABABACDCEDEFEF. The poem contains half rhyme such as “stone” and “frown” as well as “appear” and “despair”. Lots of alliteration such as “cold command”, “survive… stamped”, “remains… round”, “boundless… bare”, “sands stretch” and assonance such as “an antique land”. The final lines of the poem, in which the poem emphasizes destruction and barrenness, sounds a lot like the conclusion of a Shakespearean tragedy.
Comparison
On a Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below.
In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows.
“I am great Ozymandias,” saith the stone,
“The King of kings: this mighty city shows
The wonders of my hand.” The city’s gone!
Naught but the leg remaining to disclose
The sight of that forgotten Babylon.
We wonder, and some hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when through the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the wolf in chase,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What wonderful, but unrecorded, race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.
