Ozymandias

BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert…Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage (face) lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command…

In these lines, the reader, through the eyes of the traveler, sees two massive legs carved from stone lying in the desert sand. Nearby, the
face of the statue is half-buried. The face is broken, but the traveler can still see the sculpture is wearing a frown and a sneer. From this,
he is able to tell that this ruler probably had absolutely power, and he most definitely ruled with an iron fist. It is also easy to interpret that
this ruler probably had a lot of pride as the supreme leader of his civilization.

The traveler then turns his attention to the sculptor who made the statue, commenting that whomever the sculptor is, he knew his subject
very well. Shelley writes, “Tell that its sculptor well those passions read/Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things…” Shelley
also seems to be commenting in line seven that while there is an end to natural life, art is eternal—it survives.

Lines eight through eleven give more details about the sculpture, and the latter ones include words that have been etched into the ruler’s
pedestal. Shelley writes,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed (his actions proceeded from a wicked and cold heart that was devoid of compassion
toward the people he forced to serve him);
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
(he meant to cause his rivals despair over his incredible power, but he may have only caused them despair when they realized their
ignominious end was as inevitable as his.)

The traveler provides interesting insight into the leader here. First, his hands show that the pharaoh mocked his people, yet his heart was
not all bad: he fed and cared for his people, as well. This line provides an interesting dichotomy often found in the most terrible of leaders.
The words written on the pedestal on which the leader sits also tells of Ozymandias’ personality. He is ordering those who see him to look
upon all that he has created, but do not appreciate what he has done. Instead, despair and be afraid of it. These words perfectly depict the
leader’s hubris.

The last three lines, however, take on a different tone. Now, the leader is gone, and so is his empire. Shelley implements irony into these
lines to show that even though this broken statue remains, the leader’s civilization does not. It has fallen, much like the statue, and has
turned to dust. Shelley writes,

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

These are powerful lines, and the traveler almost seems to be mocking the ruler. Shelley’s diction here is important. He uses words such
as decay and bare to show just how powerless this once-mighty pharaoh has become. There is absolutely nothing left. The leader, much
like his land, and much like the broken statue depicting him, has fallen. It is in these lines that the theme of the poem emerges: All leaders
will eventually pass, and all civilizations will eventually fall.

Summary
The speaker recalls having met a traveler “from an antique land,” who told him a story about the ruins of a statue in the desert of his native
country. Two vast legs of stone stand without a body, and near them a massive, crumbling stone head lies “half sunk” in the sand. The
traveler told the speaker that the frown and “sneer of cold command” on the statue’s face indicate that the sculptor understood well the
emotions (or "passions") of the statue’s subject. The memory of those emotions survives "stamped" on the lifeless statue, even though
both the sculptor and his subject are both now dead. On the pedestal of the statue appear the words, “My name is Ozymandias, king of
kings: / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” But around the decaying ruin of the statue, nothing remains, only the “lone and level
sands,” which stretch out around it.
Form
“Ozymandias” is a sonnet, a fourteen-line poem metered in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme is somewhat unusual for a sonnet of this
era; it does not fit a conventional Petrarchan pattern, but instead interlinks the octave (a term for the first eight lines of a sonnet) with the
sestet (a term for the last six lines), by gradually replacing old rhymes with new ones in the form ABABACDCEDEFEF.

Commentary
This sonnet from 1817 is probably Shelley’s most famous and most anthologized poem—which is somewhat strange, considering that it is
in many ways an out of character poem for Shelley, and that it touches little upon the most important themes in his composition at large
(beauty, expression, love, imagination). Still, “Ozymandias” is a masterful sonnet. Essentially it is devoted 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 disproved; Ozymandias’s works have crumbled and
disappeared, his civilization is gone, all has been turned to dust by the impersonal, indiscriminate, destructive power of history. The
ruined statue is now merely a monument to one man’s hubris, and a powerful statement about the insignificance of human beings to the
passage of time. Ozymandias is first and foremost a metaphor for the ephemeral nature of political power, and in that sense the poem is
Shelley’s most outstanding political sonnet, trading the specific rage of a poem like “England in 1819” for the crushing impersonal
metaphor of the statue. But Ozymandias symbolizes not only political power—the statue can be a metaphor for the pride and hubris of all
of humanity, in any of its manifestations. It is significant that all that remains of Ozymandias is a work of art and a group of words; as
Shakespeare does in the sonnets, Shelley demonstrates that art and language long outlast the other legacies of power.
Of course, it is Shelley’s brilliant poetic rendering of the story, and not the subject of the story itself, which makes the poem so
memorable. Framing the sonnet as a story told to the speaker by “a traveller from an antique land” enables Shelley to add another level of
obscurity to Ozymandias’s position with regard to the reader—rather than seeing the statue with our own eyes, so to speak, we hear about
it from someone who heard about it from someone who has seen it. Thus the ancient king is rendered even less commanding; the
distancing of the narrative serves to undermine his power over us just as completely as has the passage of time. Shelley’s description of
the statue works to reconstruct, gradually, the figure of the “king of kings”: first we see merely the “shattered visage,” then the face itself,
with its “frown / And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command”; then we are introduced to the figure of the sculptor, and are able to
imagine the living man sculpting the living king, whose face wore the expression of the passions now inferable; then we are introduced to
the king’s people in the line, “the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.” The kingdom is now imaginatively complete, and we are
introduced to the extraordinary, prideful boast of the king: “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” With that, the poet demolishes
our imaginary picture of the king, and interposes centuries of ruin between it and us: “ ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ /
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, / The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

BY JOHN KEATS

Much have I travell'd in the realms (lands) of gold,

(I have read much good poetry of Western Europe)
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty (loyalty) to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse (the huge poetry of Homer) had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne (domain);
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken (field of telescope);
Or like stout Cortez (A Spanish adventurer) when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise (excitement)—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien (Old name of Isthmus of Panama).

(The Isthmus of Panama, also historically known as the Isthmus of Darien, is the narrow strip of land that lies between the Caribbean Sea
and the Pacific Ocean, linking North and South America.)

"On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" is a sonnet written by English poet John Keats when he was just 20 years old. Essentially, it is
a poem about poetry itself, describing a reading experience so profound that an entire world seems to come to life. The poem talks
specifically about a translation of Homer, the Classical Greek poet, by George Chapman, an Elizabethan poet whose translations were
more concerned with the reader's experience of the text than loyalty to the original form. The poem was published in the newspaper The
Examiner soon after it was written in 1816.

“On First Looking into Chapman's Homer” Summary

The speaker has traveled through lands full of treasure and visited numerous countries and kingdoms. The speaker has sailed to islands in
the west, where poets are loyal to Greek god Apollo.

The speaker had heard a lot about the imaginative world presided over by the genius Greek poet, Homer. But this world was never truly
brought to life until the speaker read the translations of George Chapman, which seemed to speak to him loudly and proudly.

Reading Chapman's translation of Homer's work, the speaker felt like an astronomer witnessing a new planet slide into view. This
experience was also like the kind of awe felt by the explorer Cortez when he looked out at the Pacific Ocean, when he and the men under
his command fell silent, standing on a mountain peak in the Darien region of Panama.
 Analysis

Keats composed his most famous sonnet when he was only twenty years old and had comparatively little experience in the writing of
sonnets. The poem is brilliant testimony of the effect of poetry on Keats. He had spent a night in the autumn of 1816 reading poetry with
his friend Charles Cowden Clarke, who introduced him to some of the best passages in George Chapman's translation of Homer. Keats
was delighted with the vigorous language of the Elizabethan; to him, Chapman spoke out "loud and bold." After Keats left Clarke, around
daybreak, he walked to his lodgings, sat down at his desk, wrote his tribute to Chapman, and had a copy of it on his friend's breakfast
table by ten o'clock in the morning. The poem seems to have been composed in the white heat of excitement, in a flash of inspiration.
Keats made very few changes in it, but the changes he made show that he realized that inspiration is not enough; it must be followed by
critical judgment. Keats' changes in the poem are all improvements.

It is appropriate that the finest poem in Keats' first volume of poetry should be about poetry. At the time, poetry meant more to him than
anything else in the world. He was on the point of giving up the security of a career in medicine for the uncertainties of a career in poetry.
The first four lines of "Chapman's Homer" are a statement of the experience he has already had as a reader of poetry: "Much have I
travell'd in the realms of gold . . ." In poetry he has found the gold that Cortez, and the other conquistadors he had read about in William
Robertson's History of America, had searched for so feverishly. As Keats is still young, there are innumerable discoveries of "realms of
gold" awaiting him. In "Chapman's Homer," he excitedly reports one such discovery.

To convey to the reader the thrill of discovery he has experienced in hearing his friend Clarke read from Chapman's Homer to him, he
uses two smiles that are both beautiful and apt. "Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken." The
discovery of a new planet is so rare that only one had been made between ancient times and 1781, when Sir William Herschel discovered
the planet Uranus. Keats, of course, may not have had Herschel in mind, but it was the rarity of such a discovery and the emotions which
would overwhelm the discoverer that counted. Nothing less would give the reader an adequate idea of what happened to Keats when he
"heard Chapman speak out loud and bold." "Swims," the verb used to describe the way in which a heavenly body would move into the
circular lens of an astronomer's telescope, suggests perfectly the motion of a planet as seen from the earth.

The second simile used by Keats is unquestionably the most impressive part of the sonnet. It is made up of a number of details that fit
together into an artistically pleasing whole. Cortez is "stout," that is, fearless, and he is alert, "with eagle eyes." Only men such as he
discover Pacific Oceans. His men stand about him in silent awe, looking "at each other with a wild surmise." Their imaginations are
flooded by a bewildering variety of guesses as to what lies beyond the horizon, new Americas perhaps, filled with gold and fabulous
jewels and untold possibilities of further discoveries. They are so choked with emotion that they cannot speak. This is one of the great
moments of history, and Keats boldly appropriates it to express his own feelings of having made a thrilling discovery beyond which there
may lie countless other similar discoveries as he increases his acquaintance with the world of poetry.

The two similes that swam "into his ken" as the poem formed itself in his mind are in keeping with the language of travel and discovery
that he uses in the octave of his sonnet. They give it a unity of imagery that makes of the whole a tightly knit statement of what was for
Keats, ardent lover of poetry that he was, a profoundly felt experience.

A Petrarchan sonnet must not only be unified, like any other poem, but the thought must also make a change of direction, or "turn," at the
beginning of the sestet. Keats' turn is his two comparisons taken from astronomy and exploration. Unity and coherence are assured not
only by carrying the idea of discovery all the way through the poem, but also by using the linking words "Much" and "Oft" to begin the
two halves of his octave and the word "Then" to begin his sestet. Keats, in spite of his limited experience in sonnet writing before
"Chapman's Homer," composed what is probably one of the finest Petrarchan sonnets in English poetry.

In his excitement, Keats substituted the name of Cortez for Balboa in his sonnet. In his school days he had read about Cortez' conquest of
Mexico and Balboa's discovery of the Pacific Ocean on an expedition in Darien, an old name for part of Central America, in William
Robertson's History of America. In search of a historical example of an exciting discovery, Keats put Cortez where historically Cortez
never was and made him seem to be the discoverer of the Pacific Ocean. It is not known whether Keats or any of his friends ever became
aware of the error. It is a slight blemish in a fine poem, but, as many critics have pointed out, in poetry one looks for truth in human nature
rather than for historical truth. Ideally, both should go together.