Information About ™Ozymandias |
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| poetry of percy bysshe shelley | |
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OZYMANDIAS of EGYPT I met a traveller 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 shatter'd visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things, The hand that mock'd 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. "Ozymandias" (o-zee-MAN-dee-as) ( by Percy Bysshe Shelley , published in 1818 . It is frequently anthologised and is probably Shelley's most famous short Poem . It deals with a number of great themes, such as the arrogance and transience of power, the permanence of real art and emotional truth, and the relationship between artist and subject. It explores these themes with some striking imagery, amplified by a setting - Egypt and the Sahara Desert - that was tropical and exotic for European audiences in the early 19th century. The poem's sense of distance is further enhanced by its second-hand narration; the commentator is relating to us the words of an unnamed "traveller from an antique land". SHELLEY'S POEM "Ozymandias" was written in December 1817 during a writing contest and first published in Leigh Hunt 's ''Examiner'' of January 11 , 1818 . It was republished in Shelley's ''Rosalind and Helen'' volume of 1819, and in the 'Advertisement' prefacing the volume, Shelley describes it as one of "a few scattered poems I left in England" which were used to pad out the book. Shelley also points out that the poem was selected for the book by his 'bookseller' (publisher) and not by himself. Some consider these nonchalant statements as indicating that Shelley was not particularly proud of this piece. Others disagree, considering the consistency of the ideas with Shelley's hatred of tyranny and the impact of the poem. Despite its enduring popularity, many Shelley scholars have however seen it as a piece of trivia, and few studies of Shelley's career make much of it. Harold Bloom 's ''Shelley's Mythmaking'' (1959), the major Shelley study of the 20th Century and the book that restored the importance of Shelley's reputation, does not mention it at all. of Ramesses II , Ramesseum , Luxor]] The name Ozymandias (or '''Osymandias''') is generally believed to refer to Ramesses the Great (i.e., Ramesses II ) , Pharaoh of the Nineteenth Dynasty of ancient Egypt. ''Ozymandias'' represents a transliteration into Greek of a part of Ramesses's throne name, ''User-maat-re Setep-en-re''. The sonnet paraphrases the inscription on the base of the statue, given by Diodorus Siculus as " King Of Kings am I, Osymandias. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works". Reprensentative Poetry Online–Percy Bysshe Shelley . (URL accessed 23 April 2006). The correct parsing of lines 6 to 8 is not immediately apparent to some readers. The problem is resolved by reading "survive" as a Transitive Verb . Thus, the lines mean that those passions (arrogance and sneer) have survived (outlived) both the sculptor (whose hand mocked those passions by stamping them so well on the statue) and the pharaoh (whose heart fed those passions in the first place). The double meaning of "mock'd" should also be pointed out here: this verb originally meant "to create/fashion an imitation of reality" (as in "a mockup"), as well as "to imitate" (as in "mock velvet"), before meaning "to ridicule" (especially by mimicking). In Shelley's day, the latter meaning was predominant (as seen in the works of William Shakespeare or the King James Version Of The Bible ), but in the specific context of "the ''hand'' that mock'd them", we can read both "the hand that crafted them" and "the hand that ridiculed them". The impact of the sonnet's message comes from its double irony. The tyrant declares, "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" Yet nothing remains of Ozymandias' works but the shattered fragments of his statue. So "the mighty" should despair — not, as Ozymandias intended, because they can never hope to equal his achievements, but because they will share his fate of inevitable oblivion in the sands of time. A second irony lies in the "survival" of the tyrant's character in the fragments being due not to his own powers but to those of the artist. This poem is often incorrectly quoted or reproduced. The most common misquote — "Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!" — replaces the correct "on" with "upon", thus turning the regular Decasyllabic ( Iambic Pentameter ) verse into an 11-syllable verse. It is also claimed that a common interpretation of the discourse of the sonnet is that time will always win, that nature prevails in the end. IN POP CULTURE Shelly's poem was referenced in the Sisters Of Mercy song Dominion/Mother Russia, on the album Floodland .http://www.mixi.net/Sisters.Of.Mercy/Discography/Complete.Lyrics.html#Dominion_Mother_Russia (URL accessed April 24, 2006) The poem also provided the source for the title of Issue #11 of Alan Moore 's Comic Book Limited Series '' Watchmen '', "Look on My Works, Ye Mighty." The issue ends with a quote from the poem, and one of the primary characters in the series takes Ozymandias as his superhero identity. The poem was referenced and printed in full in the first book of the '' Children Of The Lamp '' series. An excerpt from the peom was also included in the new game '' Civilization IV ''. "Ozymandias J. Llewellyn" is the name of one of the title characters from the webcomic '' Ozy And Millie ''. SMITH'S POEM In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone, Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws The only shadow that the Desert knows: – "I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone, "The King of Kings; this mighty City shows "The wonders of my hand." – The City's gone, – Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose The site of this forgotten Babylon. We wonder, – and some Hunter may express Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace, He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess What powerful but unrecorded race Once dwelt in that annihilated place. --''Horace Smith''. Shelley apparently wrote this sonnet in competition with his friend Horace Smith , as Smith published a sonnet a month after Shelley's, in the same magazine, which takes the same subject, tells the same story, and makes the same moral point. It was originally published under the same title as Shelley's verse; in later collections, however, Smith retitled it "On A Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below". Poets' Corner–Ozymandias . (URL accessed 23 April 2006). In contrast to Shelley's subtlety, Smith dedicates the entire last six lines of his verse to getting his point across and the end result gives an impression of heavy-handedness. Shelley's poem refrains from stating a specific moral as such, and instead presents a vivid tableau, leaving readers to draw their own conclusions and ponder upon the themes. The moral pathos against tyranny is so strong, however, that few readers are likely to conclude that poor Ozymandias got a raw deal from time and the elements. Nor does it address an audience of a specific time or place: until the English language falls into disuse or changes enough for the poems to be unintelligible, the audience is whoever is reading the poem and not just a London er. The image of a destroyed London will have no more or less effect on someone not from London than Ozymandias's statue. Also, by not wasting words on didactically pointing a "moral", as Smith does, Shelley is able to compress a comprehensive vision into a few lines, and encompass in his poem ideas entirely absent from Smith's poem. THE POEM AND ARCHAEOLOGY The "wrinkled lip and sneer" are not actually found on any extant sculptures of Ramses II or any other Pharaoh. Pharaonic faces have always a Buddha -like serenity in Egyptian Art . SEE ALSO FURTHER READING :Reiman, Donald H. and Sharon B. Powers. ''Shelley's Poetry and Prose''. Norton, 1977. ISBN 0-393-09164-3. :Shelley, Percy Bysshe and Theo Gayer-Anderson (illust.) ''Ozymandias''. Hoopoe Books, 1999. ISBN 977-5325-82-X NOTES EXTERNAL LINKS
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