Percy Bissche Shelley and Horace Smith Poems Reviews Essay

In 1817, Percy Bissche Shelley and Horace Smith have entered a friendly sonnet-writing competition. Writers featured in their poems the half-destroyed remnants of the statue, which was erected to Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II. Ozymandias was another name for this Egyptian monarch, it was given to him by Greek travelers.

The central theme of the poem is human vanity. Both writers tried to express the idea that decline is inevitable. No matter whom you are. Even mighty kings pass into nothingness. Kings, knights, pharaohs, and their deeds, with the flow of time, slip into obscurity. They just become a history. John Berger in his work ‘Ways of seeing’ pointed out: ‘The past is not for living in; it is well of conclusions from which we draw in order to act. Cultural mystification of the past entails a double loss. Works of art are made unnecessarily remote. And the past offers us fewer conclusions to complete in action’. Both works have the same subject, they are stylistically rich and contain a number of verbal images. Though, there are also differences that should be mentioned.

The work ‘Ozimandias’ by Percy Bissche Shelly is the mindbender for the readership. The author uses three characters in his work: narrator, traveler, and Ozymandias. The poem is an Italian sonnet with unusual rhyming scheme, it is written in iambic pentameter. The poem contains various poetic devices.

At the beginning of the poem, Shelley depicts the outer manifestation of the remnants. It helps the reader to form an image of the destroyed statue in his mind. Poet uses metaphor, epithets, and inversion here: ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert… Near them, on the sand, half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command’. In the metaphor ‘trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert…’ the author uses the tenor ‘lags of stone’, the vehicle ‘human being’, and the ground for comparison is ‘shared ability to perform actions’. Of great interest is the statement: ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’, it is an irony. The usage of this stylistic device, shows poet’s decision to tell target the audience that even the most powerful people become a history, their unfathomed might fades, and people forget about their existence. The phrase ‘Nothing beside remains’ is sarcasm. It contains negative connotations. There is a feeling that author laughs at the past might of the pharaoh. In this sonnet, Shelley uses symbolic images to express his ideas. The destroyed statue of pharaoh has a double sense. On the one hand, it symbolizes greatness, which vanishes as time goes by. On the other, it shows that the art is eternal.

Horace Smith uses the trochaic foot in his poem. There are two characters in his poem: the narrator, and the desert. There is the phrase, which confirms that desert is the second character: ‘The only shadow that the desert knows…’. Author compares the tenor ‘desert’ with the vehicle ‘human being’. This poem contains a lot of poetic devices. Smith did not include the depiction of the ruins, he just wrote about gigantic leg. The epithet ‘Gigantic leg’ is not as much impressive, as Shelley’s metaphor ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert…’. The reader imagines just one huge leg, and that is it. The grandeur of the colossal statue is lost in this poem. In his work, Smith mixes several images: image of desert, image of Ozymandias, image of Babylon, image of London. As a result, we got the overflow of unnecessary information. The work ‘On a stupendous Leg’ lacks cohesion.

In conclusion, it should be stated, these works differently treat the same subject. Unfortunately, even casual reader might notice that the poem written by Smith seems to be weaker, than that, written by Shelley. The poem ‘On a stupendous Leg’ is beautiful in and of itself, but it is not ‘Ozymandias’.

Works Cited

1. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London, UK: BBC/Penguin, 1972. Print.
2. Shelley, Percy Bissche. Ozymandias 2012. Web.
3. Smith, Horace. On a stupendous Leg of Granite 2012.