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Irony in ozymandias7/6/2023 (“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone/ stand in the desert,” he intones, by way of greeting, perhaps gesticulating wildly. That relic, in turns, falls into the sights of “a traveler from an antique land”-a frantic-eyed adventurer who can’t even manage a polite hello before grabbing the poem’s speaker by the lapels. At the “center” (is there a center? Paging Jacques Derrida …) floats the pharaoh, a transient human mystery whose meaning is interpreted and solidified by the sculptor who recreates him in stone. (I like to compare it to a Turducken.) The multiple voices, perspectives, and subjectivities nestled inside are similarly intricate and mind-boggling. Fry won’t deny that “Ozymandias” has an ironic soul, but he locates its mischief in an elaborate game Shelley is playing-on the reader.Ĭritics like to compare Shelley’s sonnet to one of those Chinese boxes that contain ever-smaller replicas of themselves. Joke’s on you, Oz! Can I call you Oz? Who cares! You’re just some rubble in the desert.Įxcept, according to the Romantic scholar Paul Fry, the poem is up to something far more complex than poking fun at a pharaoh’s empty dreams of immortality. “Shattered” and “half sunk,” the “wreck” languishes in “lone and level sands.” Given Shelley’s anti-imperial leanings, the scornful takeaway seems obvious: So much for all that arrogant posturing. The sculpted likeness, which bears his “wrinkled lip” and “sneer of cold command,” is inscribed with a boast: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings / Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” By the time we encounter the colossus, though, it has fallen into ruin. A great tyrant, otherwise known as Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II, has apparently commissioned a monument to his lofty works. We’d always thought of “Ozymandias” as a textbook example of dramatic irony-the gulf in understanding between a character speaking lines and an audience hearing them. As we prepared to put away our notes from high school English class, though, we had a “You’re Doing It Wrong: Shelley” moment. The last six lines however talk about the words on the pedestal and the desolate surroundings he contrasts the great sculpture with the surrounding emptiness, which gave a stronger feeling about the poem.Here at Brow Beat, Sharan Shetty made a case for why “Ozymandias” and Breaking Bad go together like ephedrine and red phosphorus: Both center on figures of passionate, monomaniacal ambition both explore the (weirdly seductive, or at least commanding) nature of evil, especially as pitted against a more impersonal but equally violent power-time. Basically, the poem is divided into two parts the first eight lines are describing an ancient decayed sculpture seen by a traveler. Shelley used imagery and a very impressive ironical way to write this poem. In the end, the King"s "works" are nothing, and the lines inscribed upon his statue are a sermon to those who read it. "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"(Line, 11) becomes good advice, though in an opposite meaning than the king intended, for it comes to mean that despite all the power and might one acquires in the course of their life, material possessions will not last forever. Under his statue"s haughty gaze forever, ironically teaches us this through his epitaph. This poem is written to express to us that possessions don"t mean immortality, the king who seemed to think that his kingdom would remain !. However, all that surrounds the statue is a desert. On the pedestal of the statue, there are these words, '"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!""(Lines, 10-11). A shattered stone statue with only the legs and head remaining, standing in the desert, the face is proud and arrogant, "Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read"(lines, 4-6). Shelley expresses this poem"s moral through a vivid and ironic picture. In drawing these vivid and ironic pictures in our minds, Shelley was trying to explain that no one lives forever, and nor do their possessions. He used very strong imagery and irony to get his point across throughout the poem. "Ozymandias" to express to us that possessions do not mean immortality.
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