Ozymandias Comparison

Both “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley and “Like Our Bodies’ Imprint” by Yehuda Amichai focus on the natures of life and power. In “Ozymandias”, a narrator meets a traveler from a foreign land. The traveler then begins to tell the narrator of a fallen statue of “Ozymandias, King of Kings” in a desert. In “Like Our Bodies’ Imprint”, the speaker of the poem discusses human existence and the impressions that people leave behind after they pass away. While both poems convey a similar message about the transient nature of life and power, each uses a unique set of poetic techniques to do so. “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley has multiple points of view. In total, there are three speakers, whom each have different tones and perceptions of Ozymandias.

Starting out the poem, the original narrator’s tone is indifferent to the story of the ancient ruler. However, as the speakers change from the narrator to the traveler to Ozymandias himself (through the words imbued on the statue), the tone becomes more aggressive and negative. Along with this shift in tone, the descriptions of the statue of Ozymandias get increasingly more vivid as the poem goes forward and the degrees of separation between the speaker and Ozymandias decrease. The backtracking of the distance between the narrator and Ozymandias represents the idea that as time increases, the remembrance and legacy of a person fades. In this case, the memory of Ozymandias is completely unaware to the narrator at the beginning of the poem. In addition to the point of views, “Ozymandias” has numerous instances of juxtaposition and irony.

The speaker of “Like Our Bodies’ Imprint” has a tone of hopeless despair. In multiple moments, the speaker searches for ideas and parts of their identity that will be left behind after they die. He/she thinks about the “three languages” they know and “All the colors” that they perceive. However, no matter how abstract or personal the thought, it is decided that “None will help” the speaker leave a remarkable and lasting impact on the world around them. This tone cultivates the concept that imprints of a person’s being are virtually nonexistent. No matter what someone does in life, time and nature will ultimately make it trivial. Likewise, in “Ozymandias”, the main speaker, the “traveller from an antique land”, has a negative tone. The traveler constantly mocks Ozymandias for the overwhelming pride that he has in himself. The “colossal Wreck” that is the broken-down figure of the “King of Kings” is direct sarcasm that is used to contrast the “Mighty” “Works” that Ozymandias boasts of. The sarcastic and mocking tone of the traveler diminishes the importance of Ozymandias’ life and achievements in similar respects to how the tone of “Like Our Bodies’ Imprint” creates the idea of