Literary Essay On Ozymandias

Our certified Educators are real professors, teachers, and scholars who use their academic expertise to tackle your toughest questions.Educators go through a rigorous application process, and every answer they submit is reviewed by our in-house editorial team.

Tags: Essays On FriendshipNhs Leadership EssayDebate On HomeworkApa References For ThesisUc Personal Essay Prompts 2012Assignments Help

The poem Ozymandias is a satiric poem intended to convey the message that power and pride are vain and temporary possessions that make human beings arrogant and egotistical but time will treat everything and everyone equally.

The situation of the poem is one in which the speaker is narrating to us what a "traveler from an antique land" had told him.

His heart fed upon them, as if they existed only to meet his desires. Finally, the fact that the traveller can glean so much information about the ancient king's power merely from a fallen statue drives home the immensity of his authority. which yet survive" are only "stamped on these lifeless things," yet they still come down through the ages, proclaiming how ruthlessly and unopposed the great king reigned in his day.

Although no one could stand up to him while he lived, he succumbed to the rule of time, and now only the broken statue attests to the power he once wielded over his victims.

Yet he feared no rebellion from his cruelty because of his...

Yet he feared no rebellion from his cruelty because of his great power.This and the wrinkled lip showed the "sneer of cold command" to the traveler.It seems that the sculptor knowingly represented these features on the face to tell the future generations how cruel and inhuman this tyrant was.The first thing to understand is how completely the desert sands are able to engulf and hide something like broken pieces of a statue.The ruins of the statue of Ozymandias must have been huge for them to remain uncovered, as is confirmed when the poem refers to "two vast and trunkless legs." The mere size of the original statue, therefore, is a first clue to the might and power of the person portrayed.But the traveler looked around and saw nothing other than an endless stretch of sand, nothing of the "my works" at which even the mighty was supposed to look and despair!In the course of the development of the narration of the strange story, the traveler's speech is handled in such a way as to suggest many other points of satire and other messages.The power wielded by Ozymandias comes through in the poem from specific word choices as well as from the overall image created."The sneer of cold command" on the face of the statue implies great power.The expressiveness of the carving gives further indication of the subject's character.Reference to the "shattered visage" tells us that the face of the statue was badly broken.