She also works as a freelance museum educator and teaches creative writing and English Language and Literature workshops at the British Library. He’s taken the traditional sonnet form and deliberately roughed it up a bit, highlighting the creative tension between the intellect and the aesthetic, and giving the poem its lasting impact.Īviva Dautch is an emerging poet whose work has been published in magazines and anthologies in the UK and USA, including Poetry Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, Agenda: Broadsheet 10, The Long Poem and Poetica. Not that art is totally pure for Shelley. 'Ozymandias' by Percy Bysshe Shelley is a poem told by an anonymous narrator who encounters a traveler who tells of a fallen and shattered statue in a remote area in the desert. Shelley thought poets were ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’ and there’s a hint of him crowing that it’s the arts that remain when all else is a distant memory. What has survived antiquity is not the king’s empire but a statue memorialised in another artwork: Shelley’s sonnet. Yet the sands around it are ‘boundless and bare’: none of Ozymandias’s works remain, only that of the sculptor who captured the king’s ‘sneer’. ![]() In this poem Shelley describes the remnants of a massive statue of a ‘king of kings’ (no false modesty here!) whose heart ‘fed’ on the very fact that he had the power to command such ‘vast’, ‘mighty’ things to be created. Ozymandias - I met a traveller from an antique land. 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 ![]() Play in your default media player Transcript Ozymandias is one of the most famous sonnets in European literature.
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