Lord Byron And Shelley: Themes Of Destruction

Byron and Shelley: Themes of Destruction
“Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal Wreck,” wrote Percy Bysshe Shelly in his poem, “Ozymandias.” This theme of destruction also forms the basis of Lord Byron’s poem, “Darkness.” Although each poem has a very different narrative, tone and plot, they reflect fears about the legacy of human influence and the destruction of civilization. The common theme of destruction, found in Percy Bysshe Shelly’s poem “Ozymandias” and Lord Byron’s poem, “Darkness” reflects the poets’ shared fears about the future by writing about ideas of civilization, the fall of mankind due to nature and natural instincts, life and death. “Ozymandias” and “Darkness” explore the theme of destruction through

Death in “Ozymandias” is both an ancient and physical one, and a metaphorical one. In “Darkness,” death is brutal, agonizing, violent, and touching. In “Darkness,” Byron writes, “All the earth was but one thought – and that was death,” (Byron, Line 42). In this poem, everything dies, beginning with the sun and ending with the moon. Death is achieved through killing when the humans kill the animals for food, and through dying, which happens when the humans fail to stay warm. In “Ozymandias,” Shelley uses the crumbling statue of an Egyptian king as a metaphor for the shortness of life. The poem also points out the death of the king’s ego by directly contrasting the king’s command to “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” with the fact that his statue and his works have crumbled into the desert sands (Shelley, Line 11). Although it is not a death (because the statue was never living), it is important to note how Shelley describes the statue as “lifeless” and that what survives of it is not a symbol of Ozymandias’s great power, but a more negative portrayal of him thorough his “frown / [a]nd wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command” and that it is the talent and artistic power of the sculptor which lives on (Shelley, Lines 4-5). In short, in the poems, “Darkness” and “Ozymandias,” the overarching theme of destruction is further emphasized by the use of different ideas about different

It is nature that destroys humankind when the sun disappears and the volcano erupts in “Darkness” and in “Ozymandias,” it is the sand and wind that causes the statue to fall. In Byron’s poem, humans lose the fight for their lives, and in Shelley’s poem, Ozymandias’s statue is powerless because it is lifeless, emphasizing the importance of the themes of life and death to the shared topic of destruction. Although they explore destruction using different language, they share the use of ideas about the destruction of civilization, and the fall of humankind because of nature, life and