Page 39 - Point 5 Literature Program Option 1 Teachers Guide (2) (1)

art, ozymandias has indeed been immortalized, another aspect of Romantic thinking. The
imagery builds until in the sestet we read on the pedestal the proud boast of the self-proclaimed
King of Kings – actually one of G-d’s biblical names – we can almost hear the poet’s finely
crafted verse, an echoing boom across the deserted sands: Look on my works, ye mighty, and
despair! The traveler’s tone is clearly ironic as he confirms that Nothing beside remains.

it is also interesting to note that all the words in the poem with alliteration of ‘c’, ‘q’ and ‘k’
sounds create a sound motif of elements of the past: antique, trunkless, sunk, wrinkled, sculptor,
mocked, works, decay, colossal wreck. From a Romantic point of view, the poet uses this motif to
place a focus on the destructive power of time, a natural force, over man. The poem concludes
by describing the vast desolation surrounding this colossal wreck, emphasizing a vanished
civilization through the further use of alliteration in the words boundless and bare and lone and
level. The statue of a god has been reduced to a mere monument to the futile pride of man.
Written in 1817, towards the end of shelley’s life, Ozymandias has as another of its major themes
the power of death, also a force of nature, over man – one more concern of Romanticism.
shelley had much personal experience of death, having lost his first wife, his sister-in-law and
some of his children, all in his recent past. Life expectancy was low in those days and thoughts
of his own inevitable death must also have played on his mind.
Politically, it was the time after the French Revolution, when so many aristocrats in Europe
lost their lives, and this must also have impacted on shelley, an aristocrat himself. a major
theme of the poem is the ephemeral nature of political power, voiced in a distant way through
the life and death of ozymandias, but in reality referring to the demise of the aristocracy in
the French Revolution, too controversial a subject to be addressed directly at the time. shelley
could possibly have been suggesting through the metaphor of the ruined statue that napoleon
Bonaparte, the architect of the French Revolution and founder of democracy, would ultimately
and inevitably suffer the same fate as ozymandias.

From a Romantic perspective it is also significant that all that remains of ozymandias is a statue
with an inscription, and a poem. shelley demonstrates the belief of Romanticism that it is, in
fact, art and language that outlast everything else. The sculptor has captured passions, now long
dead, that yet survive, engraved in stone, for future generations to see. The paradox of lifeless
passions and survive is cleverly brought out through further use of alliteration and assonance
(repetition of vowel sounds).
The meter is not entirely in iambic pentameter, for example, tell that, pedestal and boundless –
the poet’s refusal to conform to a specific meter also reflects his unconventional attitude. The
rhyme scheme is also unconventional for an italian (Petrarchan) sonnet because it interlinks
the octave with the sestet by gradually replacing old rhymes with new ones in the form a b a b
a c d c e d e f e f . This repetitive rhyming links to yet another theme of the poem, the idea of
cycles of ‘history repeating itself’ as kings rise and fall.
The poem also offers a good example of how sentences run on from one verse to the next to
reflect the story within the poem.

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