Irony in Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

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Ozymandias, the Greek name for Ramses II, is a sonnet written by Percy Bysshe Shelley. In the poem, Shelley uses irony as a form of satire, mocking tyranny. The poem was published, according to Ian Lancashire (University of Toronto) near January of 1818. At that time, for Europeans, places like Egypt were considered exotic and that adds to the popularity of the sonnet at the time. Shelley wrote this poem in a competition with Horace Smith who also wrote a similar poem, with the same overall themes and name. The sonnet itself is written in iambic pentameter. The first line is a reference to the speaker, "a traveler from an antique land." Imagery and figurative language used at the beginning of the sonnet,(words such as vast, trunkless, and desert) add to the desolate and barren image and tone of the sonnet. Shelley, through the form of the traveler, describes the statue?s face or ?visage? to have a wrinkled lip, and a ?sneer of cold command.? This describes a negative aspect towards the tyrannical figure. Shelley himself was against tyranny, as that is obvious in his poem here (...

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