Ozymandias Flashcards
I met a traveller from an antique land,
The speaker has never actually seen the land the traveller comes from, nor the statue that the traveller will go on to describe.
The poem is the speaker reciting what
he has been told from a ‘traveller’ he met in the desert. This second hand story could arguably link to Shelley’s view of highly arrogant authoritative figures who feel that their reputation and power will always
exist. This distance narrative furthers the speaker from the high profile figure
The speaker begins by introducing someone they met – most of the poem is told through that person’s story.
Antique’ suggests age – the events happened a long time ago but the memory is still in existence.
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert Near them, on the sand,
Statue is ‘vast’ but also trunkless – shows his power may have been huge but there was no substance to it, it soon faded away.
Ozymandias” is an example of ekphrasis, which is a written representation of visual art. The ekphrasis in Ozymandias begins in its second line, as the traveller describes the statue in the desert
-empasises size and stature, but also shows that the statue is incomplete
-the statue is barely standing, the rest is ruined and missing (suggesting that it’s being eaten away by time and the desert, a futile struggle to survive where nobody is around to care”
-supposed to eternalise him, but symbolise transient power
The fact that the legs still “stand” upright makes the statue seem stable and immovable, as though it has firmly planted its feet. However, this stability is at odds with the fact that the statue is actually in ruins: it is “trunkless,” or missing its torso
Line 2 is enjambed—there is no punctuation to pause the flow of the line after the word “stone.” The description of the legs, then, stretches across two lines, much the way that the legs still stand, stretching across time from Ozymandias’s era until now
However, the poem has a caesuraboth before and after the description of the legs: a dash precedes the description, and an ellipsis follows it. These punctuation marks break up the lines into fragments, both visually and aurally, and these fragments are reminiscent of the fragments of the statue itself. The structure of
the poem mirrors and enhances the meaning of its words
The nouns ‘desert’ and ‘sand’ show the isolation of the statue in its environment – the sands surround this one example of humanity. Perhaps a civilisation has been destroyed?
caesura
-the setting suggests an absence of life and vitality
Half sunk a shattered visage lies,
whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
The statue “frowns,” “sneers,” and
has a “wrinkled lip,” an expression often connected to disgust or scorn.
The sibilance dominates line 4 (“Half sunk a shattered visage lies”), suggesting a hissing—perhaps like the sound of something slowly sinking under sand. Meanwhile, the percussive /c/ alliteration in “cold command” gives the line a hard, militaristic feel, suggesting Ozymandias’s iron rule.
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things
he 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.”
