Ozymandias, Words for Eternity

Compare how poets present powerful rulers in Ozymandias and in one other poem (My Last Duchess)

The life of a dominant king who got lost in the things of the world, resulted in him losing focus on his destiny through power and time. It is a battle between man and the natural world he faced. Percy Shelley’s poem, Ozymandias, demonstrates that no matter the position one holds, in time, power can be arrogant and ruling, but cannot ultimately last for an eternity.

From this you can imagine a very conceited, arrogant pharaoh, commanding his people building this great vast statue hoping his power would be immortality. And when this great piece of work is done, he demanded to put such words on the pedestal: ‘"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. Look at my works, ye Mighty and despair!"’(Lines, 10-11). Ozymandias seemed to think that as long as his sculpture was there, his kingdom would last forever.

Romanticism is composed of several different themes, all of which are definitive of what Romanticism entails; one of the most prevalent and important of these themes is that of alienation, whether it be from oneself or from the world. Several poets in the Romantic period wrote on this theme, but one who imparted the most meaning in the fewest amount of words is Percy Bysshe Shelley in “Ozymandias.” Shelley tackles the idea of separate existence from yourself in a unique way: as opposed to the way William Wordsworth would tell his audience what they needed to do in order to avoid alienation, Shelley presents to his audience an example of alienation causing a person to fade into past. In telling the story of Ozymandias, King of Kings, Shelley

Shelley was heavily influenced by the principles of Romanticism and was personally exposed to writers and poets who believed in the sublime and rejuvenating power of nature. Shelley skilfully uses disease and sickness imagery,

Shelley dwells little on the small details of Ozymandias' face, but by Ozymandias' frown, wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, delivered in less than two lines, immediately carry to the reader a vision of a cold, callous, yet strong and determined leader who is commanding his people building his great vast statue hoping his power would be immortal. These concrete items are vital to the description, but are not as strong as what can not be seen. Shelley gives a nod to the talent of the sculptor, from whom Ozymandias received a mirror image of his personality, placed in stone because of his thinking to survive

In Ozymandias, the narrator speaks of an “antique land” that he’s travelled to and comes across a statue which is the King Ozymandias (who is the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II.) The structure of the poem is written in an petrarchan

In the late eighteenth century arose in literature a period of social, political and religious confusion, the Romantic Movement, a movement that emphasized the emotional and the personal in reaction to classical values of order and objectivity. English poets like William Blake or Percy Bysshe Shelley seen themselves with the capacity of not only write about usual life, but also of man’s ultimate fate in an uncertain world. Furthermore, they all declared their belief in the natural goodness of man and his future. Mary Shelley is a good example, since she questioned the redemption through the union of the human consciousness with the supernatural. Even though this movement was well known, none of the British writers in fact acknowledged

Before delving too deep into Shelley's novel, it is very important to label the ideologies and connections behind Romanticism as a literary period, and a literary movement. The poetry and prose of the Romantic movement meant to show a obvious connection to the imagination. Romanticism, at it's most basic understanding, which was mainly active through the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, can be separated from the preceding Enlightenment by recognizing that in the Enlightenment, there was a “preoccupation with reason in

In “Ozymandias”, Shelley uses destructive diction to demonstrate the inevitable passage of time. An example of this is displayed as Shelley describes the statues on the sand as “half-sunk, a shattered visage” (Shelley 4). The sand in which the statue lies symbolizes time, much like the sand found inside an hourglass. The statue once stood upright, yet now it seems to continue to be consumed deeper into the sand. Shelley demonstrates the effect of time itself on the statue’s face through her use of words such as “shattered visage”, creating an image of aging.

In the poem Ozymandias, the speaker depicts a meeting with somebody who has set out to a spot where old societies existed. From the title it is realized that he is discussing Egypt. The explorer enlightened the speaker regarding an old, crude statue in the desert. The statue if broken. The firm looks firm and capable like a ruler. The stone worker benefited a vocation at communicating the ruler's identity. The ruler was a devilish individual, however he took great consideration of his kin. On the base close to the face, the explorer peruses a subtitle in which the ruler Ozymandias advises any individual who may happen to go by essentially, "look around and see how awesome I am!". There is no proof of his greatness in the territory of his mammoth broken statue. There were simply sand similarly as he can

A poem about a statue that has far outlived its boastful inscribers, albeit shattered in pieces. This discrepancy is seen between the lines 10-12, “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings/ Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!/ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay…” Clearly, these people thought they were mighty and great, but instead, they are gone and all that remains are the shattered statues. When we die, we cannot take anything with us. It doesn’t matter how rich and important someone is in life; They are nothing but a memory when they are

 The poem "Ozymandias" tells a story about a traveler, who reveals his or her story to the narrator of the poem. The author of the poem is Percy Bysshe Shelley. He keeps the interest of the poem by using constant sounds and images that are clear and concise, by supplying mystery with words that have more than one meaning, and by using a spectrum of words that capture the interpreters attention.

"Lift not the painted veil", an 1818 sonnet by the British Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, depicts a world covered by a "painted veil". Even though this veil presents "unreal shapes", everybody accepts it as it is, except for one individual lifting it to seek love. However, this act plunges him into a state of disorientation and forlornity, since it has not lead him to discover truth or love. Therefore the sonnet's admonitory first line strongly discourages us from lifting the veil. By focussing on the connotatively contrasting use of metaphors, this essay aims at demonstrating how Percy Bysshe Shelley's sonnet "Lift not the painted veil", despite its deceptive, seemingly admonitory first line, actually encourages the individual to defy religion and to adopt atheism.

Shelley’s version of “Ozymandias” pays particular attention to the details of what remains of Ramses’s statue. Shelley conveys to the reader that no matter how powerful a ruler may be, their influence will fade with time. The description of what Babylon looks like when the poem was written gives the reader a clear