Ozymandies poem by P.B.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, 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.
“Ozymandias”
is a masterful sonnet essentially it is devoted to single metaphor
:the shattered ,ruined,statue in the desert wasteland ,with its
arrogant ,passionate face and has been ironically disproved
;ozymandias’s work have crumbled and disappeared ,his civilization
is gone ,all has been turned to dusty by the impersonal
,indiscriminate ,destructive power of history .
The
ruined statue is now merely a monument to one man’s hubris,and
powerful statement about insignificance of human beings to the
passage of time .
Ozymandias
is first and foremost metaphor for the nature of political power ,and
in that sense the poem is Shelley’s most outstanding political
sonnet, trading the specific rage of a poem like “England in 1819”
for the crushing impersonal metaphor of the statue .
but
Ozymandias symbolizes not only political power the statue can be a
metaphor for the pride and hubris of all humanity. It is significant
that all that remains of Ozymandias is a work of art and group of
words ; as Shakespeare does in the sonnets,
It is shelley’s brilliant poetic rendering of the story ,and not the subject of the story it self which makes the poem so memorable .Framing the sonnet as a story told to the speaker by “Traveller from an antique land” Ozymandias’s position with regard to the reader rather than seeing the statue with our own eyes.
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