Wednesday 25 January 2017

Ozymandias by P.B.Shelly.




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 .
Image result for ozymandiasThe 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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