Structure In Percy Bysshe Shelley's 'Ozymandias'

Despair and Ruin Structure is crucial to poetry. It helps the poet get their point across in an artistic fashion. One of the highlights of poetry is the ability to be uniquely expressive. Only the poet can decide what structure to use. Percy Bysshe Shelley utilizes structure to support the ideas and tone of his poem, “Ozymandias.” The poem’s rhyme scheme, meter, and word sounds all take advantage of the performative, spoken nature of poetry and overall make the poem more pleasing to the ear. “Ozymandias” is composed of fourteen lines and written in iambic pentameter. Therefore, it is clearly a sonnet. The question is… What kind of sonnet? Petrarchan or Shakespearean? It appears that Shelley uses parts from both sonnet types in order to enhance

True to structure, Shelley does this in the first eight lines of “Ozymandias.” The speaker is retelling his encounter with “a traveler from an antique land.” The wording implies he or she came from a place with history behind it, like Greece or Egypt. In reality, Ozymandias is the Greek name for the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II. Therefore, the reader can infer that he or she is coming from Egypt. The traveler goes on to describe a statue he or she happened upon or, rather, the remains of the statue. Two large stone legs stand without any torso attached, and the damaged head of the statue lies half buried in the sand nearby. The rest of the statue is nowhere to be seen, perhaps destroyed by an act of God or man. The traveler goes into more detail about the face of statue. It is not too badly damaged, as a “frown / and wrinkled lip and sneer” are all still discernable. The skill of the sculptor is emphasized. He or she was able to capture not only the subject’s facial features but also his personality –cold, commanding, passionate– in this work. This statue is the only sign of life for miles, surrounded only by

The traveler states the speaker that the engraving at the foot of the statue was, “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Ozymandias obviously means this as a caution to other conquerors and rulers, that none will be better than him or accomplish more than he has. This is also an implied blasphemy, because Jesus was known as the true the king of kings. Where are Ozymandias’ self-proclaimed works though? Gone. The pedestal states a warning but not the one Ozymandias intended. Other conquerors and rulers should despair, not because they will never measure up to Ozymandias, but because they will end up just like Ozymandias in the end… Shattered, broken into pieces, in the middle of nowhere. The future of every ruler is rubble. Shelley uses the remaining lines to accentuate the decay of the statue and Ozymandias’ empire. This “colossal wreck” is the only thing of note on an otherwise desolate landscape. A trace of Ozymandias only lingers as a result of the dexterity of the artist, not the glory of the