What Is The Mood Of The Poem Ozymandias The King Of King

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Ozymandias: King of Kings

Ozymandias is a sonnet written by Percy Bysshee Shelley in the year 1818 and is one of the most famous poems in the English language. Though it is considered a sonnet, it does not have the simple rhyme scheme or punctuation that most sonnets have. The poem speaks of tyranny and how time makes a mockery of the boastfulness of even the most powerful and highly praised kings. Ozymandias is also an ekphrastic poem, meaning the poem is mostly about another work of art. Ozymandias was written in a result of a competition between Shelley and his friend Horace Smith. Ozymandias was the name by which Ramses II, a pharaoh famous for the number of architectural structures he caused to be erected, had been known to the Greeks. …show more content…

Essentially, it is loyal to a single metaphor: the shattered, ruined statue in the desert wasteland, with its arrogant, passionate face and monomaniacal inscription (Look on my works, ye mighty and despair). The once-great king’s proud boast has been ironically contradicted; Ozymandias’s works have crumbled and disappeared, his civilization is gone, and all has been turned to dust by the impersonal, indiscriminate, destructive power of time and history. Of course, the pharaoh’s “works” are nowhere to be seen, in this desert wasteland. The kings that he challenges with the evidence of his superiority are the rival rulers of the nations he has enslaved, perhaps the Israelites and Canaanites known from the biblical account. However, the following line “Nothing beside remains. Round the decay” is obviously apparent that he is to be pitied, if not disdained, rather than be in awe and fear: The broken-down tomb is set in a vast wasteland of sand, possibly, Shelley’s way of suggesting that all tyrants and authoritarians ultimately end up in the only kind of kingdom they ultimately deserve, a barren desert or wasteland.
Though Ozymandias (Ramses II) was a mighty and flourishing ruler in his time as Pharaoh, he attempted to find fulfillment and recognition in his reign rather than display humility and modesty. The full irony of the poem is brought home by the final image of the boundless sands, stretching as far as the eye can see. If there is any or little left of the sculptor's work, there is enough, so far, to bear witness to tyranny. Of the tyrant's works, nothing remains. The poem is memorable for Shelley’s brilliant poetic rendering of the story, and not just the subject of Ozymandias and the story

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