Image: Ozymandias by alexzakil, on deviantart (Creative Commons). He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem. The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University.
You can listen to a reading of ‘Ozymandias’, complete with an animated video, here.įor more close analysis of Romantic poetry, check out our analysis of Keats’s ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ and Wordsworth’s classic daffodils poem. examination of the poets technique, form, meter, rhyme, symbolism, jaw-dropping trivia. In the last analysis, Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ is a fine reminder that everything – even mighty empires – is doomed to fall to dust. Ozymandias: Shmoop Poetry Guide Shmoop on. Ozymandias’ empire may have gone, but the poem written in his name has endured. Not up to Shelley’s standard, perhaps – but not a bad effort. He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace, Wonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness Shelley’s poem rhymes ababacdcedefef. The rhyme of ‘appear’ with ‘despair’ is a masterstroke: ‘despair’ also chimes with ‘appear’ by summoning that verb’s ghostly opposite, ‘disappear’ – exactly what has happened to Ozymandias’ vast empire, and decidedly apt given that ‘disappear’ itself doesn’t actually appear in the poem. In terms of its form, the poem is innovative and worthy of closer analysis: its fourteen lines and iambic metre mark it out as a sonnet, but its rhyme scheme is different from the traditional English or Italian sonnet. Shelley had no time for gods, or God, either: indeed, he had been expelled from the University of Oxford for writing a pamphlet titled The Necessity of Atheism, which shows how radical such a belief (or rather lack of belief) was held to be in early nineteenth-century Britain. The phrase ‘King of Kings’ is associated with the Christian God, or more specifically with Jesus Christ: in the New Testament, the phrase is used in reference to Christ in the First Epistle to Timothy (6:15) and the Book of Revelation (twice – see 17:14, 19:11–16). However, it does not follow the regular sonnet rhyme scheme, reflecting the way human power can be disrupted and destroyed. Or perhaps for ‘King of Kings’ we should think not a God-anointed king but God himself (as Egyptian pharaohs like Rameses II were thought to be gods on earth).
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