NAME : ARIEF SULAEMAN (2109080023)
CLASS : 2C
OZYMANDIAS
(PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 1792-1822)
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look upon 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.
Essentially it is devoted to a single metaphor: the shattered, ruined statue in the
desert wasteland, with its arrogant, passionate face and monomaniacal inscription
(“Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”). The once-great king’s proud boast has
been ironically disproved; Ozymandias’s works have crumbled and disappeared, his
civilization is gone, all has been turned to dust by the impersonal, indiscriminate,
destructive power of history. The ruined statue is now merely a monument to one man’s
hubris, and a powerful statement about the insignificance of human beings to the
passage of time. Ozymandias is first and foremost a metaphor for the ephemeral nature
of political power, and in that sense the poem is Shelley’s most outstanding political
sonnet.. But Ozymandias symbolizes not only political power—the statue can be a
metaphor for the pride and hubris of all of humanity, in any of its manifestations.
Of course, it is Shelley’s brilliant poetic rendering of the story, and not the
subject of the story itself, which makes the poem so memorable. Framing the sonnet as
a story told to the speaker by “a traveller from an antique land” enables Shelley to add
another level of obscurity to Ozymandias’s position with regard to the reader—rather
than seeing the statue with our own eyes, so to speak, we hear about it from someone
who heard about it from someone who has seen it. Thus the ancient king is rendered
even less commanding; the distancing of the narrative serves to undermine his power
over us just as completely as has the passage of time. Shelley’s description of the statue
works to reconstruct, gradually, the figure of the “king of kings”: first we see merely the
“shattered visage,” then the face itself, with its “frown / And wrinkled lip and sneer of
cold command”; then we are introduced to the figure of the sculptor, and are able to
imagine the living man sculpting the living king, whose face wore the expression of the
passions now inferable; then we are introduced to the king’s people in the line, “the
hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
” The kingdom is now imaginatively complete, and we are introduced to the
extraordinary, prideful boast of the king: “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
With that, the poet demolishes our imaginary picture of the king, and interposes
centuries of ruin between it and us: “‘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.”
TOTAL MEANING
Sense : this poem tell about the king, Ozymandias that feel mighty and absolute
like god
Feeling : is first and foremost a metaphor for the ephemeral nature of political power
and in that sense the poem is Shelley’s most outstanding political sonnet
Tone : The poet demolishes our imaginary picture of the king, and interposes
centuries of ruin between it and us
Intention : Its purpose to tell us about morality that the absolute mighty can be
destroyed us.
