Ozymandias Essay

Line one of Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias” opens with a speaker meeting a stranger, from an “antique land”. After the first line, the poem shifts to the stranger being the speaker in the poem. The speaker in line one only serves to introduce and describe to the reader the later speaker from a foreign land. The original speaker describes the stranger as a “traveler from an antique land”. Shelley’s use of the word “antique” in line one invokes the sense that not only is the land that the traveler is from old but it is ancient and ancient evokes a sense of decay, which becomes important later in the poem.
In line two, the traveler becomes the speaker of the poem as aforementioned. In lines two through five, the traveler describes a structure that he had encountered in his native land. In lines two through five, Shelley uses imagery in the speaker’s description by using words like “vast”, “stone”, and “sand” to describe the elements of nature present in the structure. Shelley also uses imagery to describe the condition of the structure as

In Line twelve, after the period, through line fourteen the speaker describes the reality of the structure as it lay in rubble. Shelley uses words like “decay” and “wreck” to describe the condition of the structure as the speaker views it has deteriorated from years of withstanding the desert conditions. Shelley then uses words such as “boundless”, “bare”, and “lone” to emphasize that the structure is alone in the desert slowly fading away without concern from society. The irony of the poem is ultimately revealed in lines twelve through fourteen where the demise of the structure is described, in juxtaposition to lines nine through twelve where the statue is described as a structure that will last forever and immortalize Ramses