Simple poem(شعر ساده)
Simple poem(شعر ساده)
Ozymandias
Summary and analysis
A poem by PB Shelly:
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stoneStand in the desert Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed,
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look upon 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.
The "hand" that mocked the passions of Ozymandias is the sculptor's; the "heart" that fed those passions was Ozymandias's.
The figure of speech exemplified in "hand" and "heart" is Metonymy.
In the "frown, /And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command," the sculptor knew that his imperceptive and arrogant master would see only the signs of his awesome authority and power whereas the more perceptive viewer would note the absence of joy, wisdom, compassion, and humility--the marks of true greatness--and see only crude ambition and cruel passions. The insight of the artist has outlasted the power of the conqueror.
No English reader in 1817 could have read this poem without thinking of Napoleon, who had made himself conqueror and ruler of almost all of Europe befoet he was defeated at Waterloo in 1815 and exiled on the barren island of St. Helena in 1817. In more recent times we may be reminded of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, or Saddam Hussein.
The central theme of "Ozymandias" is the vanity of the claims of human tyrants to enduring glory. It is brilliantly conveyed through irony of situation: the overturn of expectation by fulfillment. [nothingness rather than grandeur]: After reading the inscription on the pedestal, the second line of which may be paraphrased, "Look on my works, ye mighty (but lesser) kings, and despair of ever equaling them," one expects to look up and see a great imperial city with marble palaces, temples, hanging gardens, monuments, and fortified walls; instead, as far as the eye can reach, one sees only emptiness and sand.
[the one item left mocks rather than glorifies]: Increasing the irony is the fact that the sole remaining work of this self-proclaimed "king of kings" is a huge broken statue (its hugeness manifesting his megalomania) carved by an artist who saw through the self-deluding egocentrism of the ruler and recorded it in stone, mocking Ozymandias, as it were, to his face.
[artistic depiction of human emotions outlast mocked king\mocking artist] The passions depicted in the stone visage have outlasted both the artist and the tyrant. The words on the pedestal were not composed by the sculptor. Ozymandias commanded the sculptor to inscribe them there. The sculptor "mocked" Ozymandia's by his frank portrayal of the ruler's character in the sculptured visage.
[only by coincidence have we the reader heard of Ozymandias] The emptiness of Ozymandias's pretensions to everlasting fame is further increased by the fact that this whole account has been related to the speaker by "a traveler from an antique land." That is, the speaker would never have heard of Ozymandias at all had it not been for his chance encounter with a desert explorer. (And most of us, in our turn, would never have heard of Ozymandias had the poet Shelley, another artist, not written a poem about the incident.)