![]() While Ozymandias saw his statue as an imposing manifestation of his power, the sculptor saw it as an example of his subject’s overwhelming hubris. Shelley’s use of the word “mocked” when describing the sculptor’s technique functions as a double entendre: “mocked,” in this context, means both to copy and to deride. He accomplishes this through an obvious use of irony: the “colossal Wreck” of the deserted statue declares, “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,/Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” The irony, of course, lies in the fact that the statue is now surrounded only by nothing but “lone and level sands.” Going further, Shelley implies that the sculptor had subversive intentions when carving the “sneer of cold command,” knowing that the exaggerated expression would speak to Ozymandias’s misplaced pride, instead of his all-encompassing power. Shelley is not simply content to display the intrinsically fleeting nature of power, he also wants to highlight the hubris of individuals who believe they can defy this inevitability. This conspicuously loaded word choice further reinforces the overarching project of “Ozymandias”: no one is immortal, and no civilization or construct can stand forever. Shelley adds a subtle critique on Christianity to this argument in line ten by having Ozymandias declare himself the “King of Kings,” a moniker often assigned to Jesus. Ozymandias’s “frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command” is the first instance of Shelley planting dramatic irony into the poem: Ozymandias’s facial features are frozen in a menacing expression of confidence and power, yet his kingdom has long since crumbled, and his statue is not even whole anymore. The two lines that immediately follow describe the statue’s partially obscured head, which is “Half sunk” in the sand. Lines two and three-“‘two vast and trunkless legs of stone/Stand in the desart’”-situate the reader geographically and establish the dilapidated state of Ozymandias’s statue. Accordingly, Shelley’s language is precise and concrete, making the poem dense with specific imagery. The sonnet’s litheness leaves no room for abstractions. He does not consider the Petrarchan or Shakespearean sonnet an immortal form, just like Ozymandias’s kingdom cannot possibly stand forever. Shelley’s disregard for conventional forms reinforces the poem’s themes. As a result, the poem has a tight, prose-like quality to it, reading smoothly and quickly. Instead, it is presented in one block of cohesive text. Additionally, “Ozymandias” is not broken into an octave and a sestet. Shelley’s frequent use of enjambment further obfuscates the rhymes and makes them less pronounced. The rhyme scheme, too, is abnormal, conforming to no historically precedented pattern. Lines three and twelve, meanwhile, open with trochees, ignoring the idea that a sonnet must solely consist of iambs. ![]() It operates in a loose iambic pentameter, with every line consisting of ten syllables, except for the first and tenth, which have eleven. Structurally, “Ozymandias” does not adhere to one specific form, although it does contain elements of both the Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnet. Shelley’s core beliefs-like the importance of atheism, the impermanence of man-made societal structures, and the unpreventable certainty of oblivion-thematically buttress the foundation of “Ozymandias.” With uncharacteristic subtlety and nuance, Shelley uses the poem’s eponymous statue to evidence the ephemerality of power and civilization as a whole. That said, a close reading of the sonnet reveals its political and theological heart. Shelley’s often combative, politically-charged style makes “Ozymandias” seem tame in comparison to most of his other poems. ![]() Percy Shelley’s sonnet “Ozymandias” (1818) is, in many ways, an outlier in his oeuvre: it is short, adhering to the fourteen line length of most traditional sonnets its precise language, filled with concrete nouns and active verbs, contrasts against the circuitous, abstract language of “O World! O Life! O Time!” (1824) and, most saliently, it does not seek to radicalize or shock, like the “The Necessity of Atheism” (1811) or The Cenci, his 1819 closet drama about incest and murder. ![]()
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