Analyzing the Poem Ozymandias
Percy Bysshe, a romantic poet, is the writer of Ozymandias poem (Hoffman-Schwartz 163-165). Percy is the speaker of the poem. Ozymandias refers to a different name of Ramses II, an ancient pharaoh of Egypt. The speaker who is Percy says to have met a traveler who was coming from an ancient land. The traveler explains two different stone legs, which were large and belonged to a statue. The legs lacked a torso, which would help to link them to the desert and assist them to stand upright. The poem also talks about the broken face of a statue that is buried near the legs.
The facial expression of the statue is a frown, and the lip is wrinkled (Hoffman-Schwartz 163-165). The facial expressions assert that the speaker knew about the emotions of the individual who is portrayed by the statue. The importance of this poem is that it shows how time has not been good to the statue, and it shows that no levels of power can overcome the unceasing and merciless passage of time as it describes how the statue of a powerful king is decaying in the deserts which is very far.
The type of irony used in this poem is situational irony, which refers to an irony that entails a situation whereby actions have an impact that is totally opposite from the intended reason so that the results are not in line with what was intended (Güngör 1490-1498). The poem is told by a narrator who comes across a traveler who gives the story about a statue situated in a distant desert. The said statue is of Ramses the Great, and this makes the irony used in the poem to be situational. The story of the statue is to point on the greatness of Ramses II and how his fame and work will live forever, just like the stone of the statue.
References
Güngör, T. Ö. “The reflections of percy bysshe shelley’s radical personality and mentality in some of his poems.” Journal of Social and Humanities Sciences Research 7.54 (2020): 1490-1498.
Hoffman-Schwartz, Daniel. “On Breaking Bad/‘Ozymandias’.” Oxford Literary Review 37.1 (2015): 163-165.