5/1/2023 0 Comments Percy shelley ozymandiasThe impulse for effecting change was authentic in the poet, and never more effective than when his extreme solipsism, narcissism even, threatened to derail his intention. Shelley's lifelong Republican urge - his vocal support of the revolutionary dynamic and embryonic socialistic ideas - harried the establishment, who viewed him as a potential agent provocateur, and actively investigated his 'seditions'. And transience, whose depredations may elicit both elegiac longing, and consolation, is the key to an understanding of 'Ozymandias'. The ecclesiastical phrase 'Sic transit gloria mundi' - 'thus passes the glory of the world' - barely covers Shelley's insight because, along with the glorious, time's necessary transience also consigns the vainglorious to the waste bin of history. Trump are unwittingly invoking Shelley's two century old certainties. Those many who are presently wishing an early nemesis on Donald J. Well accustomed to the imperial huffings and puffings of his own generation - Napoleon Bonaparte had met his Waterloo only three years before the publication of the poem in 1818 - the poet was perceiving the end of what we might now call a dictatorship as an inevitable, and no doubt fortuitous, casualty of time. And I don't doubt Shelley's intention when he contrived 'Ozymandias' as a cautionary tale. Nothing better inscribes a poem's value for posterity than its continued relevance. The lone and level sands stretch far away." 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
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