Ozymandias Flashcards
Ozymandias
Poem explores how power can be arrogant and cruel ‘sneer of cold command’ but cannot last forever.
Structure
The first line and a half up to the colon are the narrator’s words, the rest are those of the traveller he meets. There are no clear stanzas as such. Instead, it is one, 14-line block of text that is split up with lots of punctuation throughout. One verse could represent the cycle of power, how it begins, but will always one day end.
Context
Born in Horsham, Sussex, he came from a wealthy family and was in line to inherit both riches and his grandfather’s role as an MP. He went to Eton College and then Oxford. He was expelled from university for writing abouti atheism (not believing in God) which led to him to fall out with his father who disinherited him. In the same year, 1811, he eloped and married aged 19. His bride, Harriet Westbrook, was only 16. They moved to the Lake District where he continued to write.
Three years later, Shelley left for Europe with another woman, Mary Godwin (who later became Mary Shelley and wrote Frankenstein). Shelley had children by both women. In 1816, Harriet Shelley’s body was recovered from a lake - it was thought she had killed herself. Three weeks later, Shelley married Mary.
Shelley drowned at sea during a sailing trip to Italy.
Language techniques
‘Sneer of the cold command’
Alliteration, of the c sound.
Emphasises the hardness of Ozymandias’ personality.
‘Sneer of the cold command’
Alliteration, of the c sound.
Emphasises the hardness of Ozymandias’ personality.
‘On the sand, half sunk , a shattered visage lies’
Sibilance
Caesurae
A caesura is a break of meaning and rhythm within a line. Shelley uses several within the poem and each one has significant effects.
The first falls after ‘Who said:’ in the second line. The pause here mimics the traveller’s intake of breath before telling his story, dramatising the moment as well as creating distance between the description of the statue and the poet’s retelling, almost as if recalling from memory
Starts unstressed, end stressed
Feeling of tenseness.
Poem ends with a feeling of mystery and emptiness.
Leaves reader thinking about meaning.
‘King of kings’
God like
