Ozymandias

Question 1

Ozymandias context (Percy Bysshe Shelley)

Answer 1

• Shelley - Political radical - born into wealth + educated
• As a romantic poet - Shelley was conscious of the rich / poor gap and thought political reform was needed
• At the time, Napoleon was a tyrannical emperor in Europe
• Poem is a warning to rulers who opress the people
• Wrote the poem to compare with Horace Smith’s Poem on the same topic

Question 2

Ozymandias MUST mention

Answer 2

• The poem is a ironic memorial to the ego of a ancient Pharoah
• The statue is an allegory for the eventual end of power that everyone must suffer, especially the proud
• Power, like the statue is lost to the sands which in turn represent time

Question 3

Ozymandias Structure

Answer 3

• Written in a sonnet with loose iambic pentameter. lambic pentameter is pairs (iams, of sounds da-dum) with 5 (pentameter, think of pent like in pentagon) in a line making 10 syllables overall
• Sonnets were generally popular romantic or love poems, perhaps this being a love poem about Ozymandias, a joke about the rulers ego. Or simply to capture the romantic and exotic tone of a lost legend
• The Rhyme scheme is irregular, perhaps symbolic of the broken statue itself, no longer perfect