Vanessa John

Paul Serralheiro

602-102-MQ

September 30, 2014

Poetry analysis essay

Poems often carry a message or a taught larger than the poem itself that arouses the senses to a deeper meaning.One of the greatest romantic poets ,Percy Bysshe Shelley, created poems that embody both complex philosophical positions and his attitudes towards them with the help of symbols pulled from nature(134). His poem “Ozymandias” caricaturizes the fall of glory through the statue of an Egyptian pharaoh to portray the ineveatable reality about the insignificance of life to the course of nature. The basis of the poem is centered around the symbolism of the statue of the once King Ramses II, evoked through the use of imagery based off the sightings of a traveller the speaker met.The statue appears to be situated somewhere in ancient Egypt,"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone/Stand in the dessert...Near them,on the sands/Half sunk, a shattered visage lies,whose frown/And wrinkled lip,and sneer of cold command"(2-5), painting the image of a dismanteld statue buried by the sand, and the distached stringent face of a tyrant King who once ruled a civilization, who is now reduced to stone with no one at his feet. The speaker also uses figures of speech to further express the theme of the poem.Irony is conveyed when the speaker describes what is written on the pedestal "My name is Ozymandias,king of kings:/Look on my works,ye mighty, and despair!"(10-12). Which is ironic because he has nothing to show for his works and all the glory he proclaims besides a mere stone replica of himself that is virtually unrecogniziable. In addition, a lot of symbolism can be seen troughtout the poem such as on line 1 "an antique land" represents the picturesque ancient Egypt, on line 7 "these lifeless things" represent the remains of the statue of the King, and on line 8 "the hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed" the "hands"represents the sculptor who crafted the statue, and