July 30, 2013
From Gerald R. Lucas
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I met a traveller from an antique land,[2] |
Notes and Commentary
- ↑ The Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II was called Ozymandias by the Greeks, and his reign was the height of Egyptian imperial power. According to Diodorus Siculus, a first-century Greek historian, the following was written at the base of Ramses II statue—the largest in Egypt: “I am Ozymandias, King of kings. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass any of my works.” Ancient Egyptian culture was one obsessed with death and time, and here, Shelley muses on whether is poetic effort, like the statue of Ozymandias, will last throughout the ages (Bloom 2001, p. 18).
- ↑ Antique implies a temporal ambiguity, both as to the current time in which the narrator resides and the antique time from which the traveller comes. The poem becomes the interface or time warp where they come together (Bloom 2001, p. 18). A similar ambiguity resides around where it is they meet.
- ↑ Shelley’s first use of mock, see the note to line 8 below, here are the stumps of legs.
- ↑ From the Latin visus, implying not only the face, but the personality of the wasted king, “one who was arrogant, mean-spirited, and tyrannical” based on the subsequent description (Bloom 2001, p. 19). Shelley, like the other Romantics, opposed the political tyranny, so his poem shows how the ruler and possibly this attitude toward government has been worn away by time.
- ↑ The hand is that of the sculptor’s who mocked or imitated and perhaps made fun of the artist’s passions. A “mock,” is also a stump or similar large stick of wood, like a Yule log (Bloom 2001, p. 18). To mock becomes the central pun in the poem, meaning both ridicule and imitate. Mocked plays on visage suggesting an outward falsehood or show. However, here the artist’s skill shows the truth of his subject, as if in art, reality lies. This idea is solidified with the writing on the pedestal.
- ↑ A parallel of the first part of the line: the heart is the king’s which fed his passions.
- ↑ Ironically, this heroic inscription of the living tyrant becomes, in the words of Anne Janowitz, “a dismal epitaph on the ruler’s works, now reduced to dust” (quoted in Bloom 2001, p. 22). In this irony, the poem is simultaneously able to show the imaginative and creative power of the poet who de-creates reality in his verse.
- ↑ Sand is used to mark time, but here has been the agent of decay. Here is Shelley’s theme: art perseveres over time. True monuments will always succumb to a similar wear by time; perhaps the words of poets will outlive them all—or the visage of the fallen monument.
Bibliography
- Bloom, Harold (2001). Percy Bysshe Shelley. Bloom’s Major Poets. New York: Chelsea House.
