The poem highlights the transience of human life, ephemeral nature of human power and fragility of human existence.
Theme and Central Idea of the Poem Ozymandias The lone and level sands stretch far away.Ĭlick here to see stanza-wise explanation (Paraphrase) of Ozymandias Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!' The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,Īnd wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Who said-"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Below is the complete text of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias.” I met a traveller from an antique land,
and the following year republished in 1819 in his collection Rosalind and Helen. Shelley’s this poem was published on January 11, 1818, in the weekly paper The Examiner.
“Ozymandias” is one of the most famous poems of the Romantic era and it has eventually become Shelley’s most well-known work. Instead, Shelley’s argument is one which reflects many of the tenets of the Romantic movement: the idea of the poet as a visionary or prophet, the primacy of the imagination, and the ways in which the poet can change the world, becoming lawmaker, statesman, and philosopher all in one.5 Ozymandias: Book Exercises’ Solutions Poem Ozymandias Abrams observed in his analysis of ‘A Defence of Poetry’, in his brilliant The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Galaxy Books), Shelley’s argument in ‘A Defence of Poetry’ is in some ways a Platonic one, concerned with ‘eternal Forms’ but crucially, whereas Plato had written of poets as the rivals of philosophers and statesmen as imitators of the natural world, Shelley collapses this rivalry and argues that great lawmakers and philosophers are poets.Ĭritics have often noticed that ‘A Defence of Poetry’ is a great essay on poetry in spite of what it leaves out: there is no detailed history of the development of poetry (Shelley’s whistle-stop tour of classical and medieval poets notwithstanding), nor is there any list of rules which good poets should follow. This is why, in that often-quoted final line, ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’: because poets have both the moral purpose and the imaginative faculties which help to make our world and its moral systems what they are.Īs M. Shelley’s central argument in ‘A Defence of Poetry’ is, at bottom, a moral one: poets enhance our sympathetic imaginations and thus poetry is a force for moral good. Poets, then, are the makers of civilisation itself, as Shelley argues: It is through reason but also through imagination that we can identify beauty in the world, and from such a perception or realisation are great civilisations made. Reason, he tells us, is logical thought, whereas imagination is perceiving things, and noticing the similarities between things (here, we might think of the poet’s stock-in-trade, the metaphor and simile, which liken one thing to another). Reason and imagination are both important faculties in the poet.
In the early days of civilisation, men ‘imitate natural objects’, observing the order and rhythm of these things, and from this impulse was poetry born. Shelley argues that poetry is mimetic: that is, it reflects the real world. However, the Miscellany folded after its first issue, so Shelley’s essay was never printed – and it only appeared in print in 1840, eighteen years after Shelley’s death, when his widow, Mary Shelley, published it. Shelley intended his essay to be published in the follow-up issue of the Literary Miscellany, which had published Peacock’s essay that had prompted Shelley’s rebuttal.