OZYMANDIAS

By Percy Bysshe 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, 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.’

(1817)

<(URL: http://www.uv.es/fores/poesia/ozymandias.html)>

Ozymandias is a poem based on a story which the author tells and deals about the meeting between the author and a traveller from an antique land who describes an old sculpture of a King called Ozymandias. The first time I have read the poem I do not exactly know the main theme because at first I didn’t understand what the traveller said about Ozymandias. The main theme of the poem I think is that Ozymandiaswas a very powerful king but finally the time passed and now we can only find a sculpture about him, then I think that what the poet wants to say is that all people are the same and doesn’t matter if we were kings or vagabonds because at death’s time we were all the same. 
 
 

The tone of the poem is sad, distressing, it incites to desperation because the poet tells a story of a death man who apparently was bravery and a powerful man and now we have his ruins to remind him. The language used is easy for me to understand and the poem is not very long but I have to read it many times to understand the meaning of the poem. When I saw the poem I do not think that behind these few verses there would be a very interesting message to discover in. the author uses the direct speech and he tells the story in first person “I met a traveller…”(line 1). I think that Shelley does this to make the story more believable and realistic. The author mainly uses a sea language, for example “land” line 1, “sand” line 3, “sunk” line 4, “survive” line 7. 
 
 

This poem is a sonnet which has 14 lines, each line has 10 syllables. The rhyme in the poem is A-B-A-B-A-C-D-C-E-D-E-F-E-F.

Shelley makes a contrast between the terms for example in one hand; line 2 “vast”, “sneer of cold command” line 5, “…Ozymandias kings of kings” line 10, “colossal” line 13 etc; and in the other hand “desert” line 3, “shattered” line 4, “decay” line 12, “boundless and bare” line 13, “lone and level sands far away” line 14 etc. Shelley makes this to contrast Ozymandias life because when Ozymandias was alive he was “kings of kings” but now when he is dead we can only see ruins sinking in the sand. 
 

The image that the author creates in the reader is that when we are thinking in the sculpture of Ozymandias in the sand we imagine the broken and stone sculpture with physical and psychological features (“frown and wrinkled lips, and sneer of cold command” lines 4-5) and the strong character (“Tell that its sculptor well those passions read” line 6) that Shelley has described before. The poet tries to form in the broken sculpture 

all the force and power that Ozymandias has when he was alive. But when we end to read the poem we can see that the real Ozymandias was ruins sunk in the sands.
 

When I read the poem the first time I believe that it has not got any problem to understand the meaning of the poem because the language was not complicated a lot but when I read the poem sometimes I started to think that there was something more in the poem, something like an indirect question about life. I consider that Shelley with this poem has done thinking a lot of people because when you read that such an incredible and powerful man has ended to ruins you can think that if everything what you have done in life, good or bad, in the end it has served you for something because when your final day comes everything will be seen equal. 

I think that once you understand Shelley’s thought in the poem, you are going to question so many questions about the final objective of life or about things related to the topic.


 
 
 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Free essays- Ozymandias by Percy Shelley Ozymandias Essay, www.123helpme.com, Ed, D. Lordton, last visited 5th August 2006 <(http://www.123helpme.com/assets/6786.html)>
 
 


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