Shelly's Search For Meaning In The Poem Ozymandias

In the poem Ozymandias, the narrator refers to a “lifeless” statue in the form of a great king. However, the irony of the poem is that while the statue is not living or breathing the wording of the poem treats it as if it is an actual body. The first time I saw this play on words was in line seven. When Shelley wrote this line he chose to say that the object is surviving, yet merely three words separate the words “survive” and “lifeless”. I find the spacing and wording here to be incredibly important because not only could our writer have replaced “survive” and “lifeless” with similar meaning words such as “live” and “dead” but he also had the option to paint a different picture with his words here. By simply choosing to use “survive” Shelly has led our minds to see it as this object not only lived, which would have implied an easy existence, but that it endured hardship. According to Webster’s dictionary, to survive is to remain alive or to live on. He deliberately chose this adjective just as he chose “lifeless”. Although he could have said, “on these dead things” and implied the same meaning, I believe he wanted to use lifeless because it shows that life was taken from or lost to the object.
When one looks at the poem in a broader sense, however, they will notice his play on words, which is quite peculiar. Words such as

With these words, the author has added to our body, currently only a sneer and two legs, a hand and a heart. Once the reader looks closely, though, they would see that this hand and heart are not behaving as one typically would. The hand is mocking, such like one would think the sneer would behave, and the heart is feeding something, much like one would think the hand would. Therefore, the irony in this line is that Shelley is electing those two body parts to do actions of another that he has already