6/13/2023 0 Comments Irony in ozymandias![]() ![]() The lone / and lev- / vel sands / stretch far / a- way.īut the resolution is noticeably not iambic. Of that / co- los- / sal Wreck, / bound-less / and bare, No- thing / be- side / re- mains. / Round the / de- cay So what are these “works” “ye Mighty” should “look on” “and despair”? At last the poem resolves itself: ![]() Look on my / works, ye / Migh-ty, and / des-pair!Ī rhapsode of dactylic pride. Lines which feel like a heroic couplet, and indeed, that’s the irony: they are. Have you noticed that Shelley only maintains iambic couplets and meanwhile keeps fragmenting them and breaking them down? This has all been foreshadowing for what comes next, the naked raw heroic pride overcoming even meter itself! My name / is Oz- / zy- man- / dias, King / of Kings Much like the sculpture this poem describes, the meter employed describing it is problematic.**īut Shelley hasn’t yet reached the poem’s emotional payoff, and, like a fugal counterpoint, the iambic couplet reasserts itself:Īnd on / the ped- / des- tal, / these words / ap- pear: Thus the reader is cadentially unaware of the “missing foot” between that mocked and the heart, an aural illusion that allows this poem to sound iambic without actually being iambic. But Shelley has already used trisyllabic feet and alternated trochees and iambs for choriambic effect. Where there are only, in fact, four stresses. The hand / that mocked them, / and the heart / that fed The tension between the aural trick and the collapsing meter climaxes with the next line Which yet / sur- vive, / stamped on / these life- / less things,Ĭontinues to break the meter down, now with two trochees instead of just one. In fact, the four iambic feet following the trochee function as an aural illusion, a cue to the ear that keep going iambically, even though The third and sixth lines having trochaic openings are a cue to the reader that things are not as they seem that even in an extended iambic stretch Shelley is not content to let well enough alone. This is more than just a minor metric stutter, though. Tell that / its sculp- / tor well / those pas- / sions read,īegins with a trochee. ![]() Half sunk / a shat- / tered vis- / age lies, / whose frown,Īnd wrink- / led lip, / and sneer / of cold / com- mandīut Shelley doesn’t maintain the iambic meter any further. By the time we reach the near, the dangling syllable has resolved the preceding iamb into an amphibrach, allowing near them to open the line’s second half as a trochee - thereby recalling the initial trochaic S tand in. In so doing, Shelley has achieved, purely through cadential manipulation, the effect of a speaker stalling out in their discourse before restarting, an effect concluded with the anapest on the sand, an anapest that returns the stress to the normal iambic pattern,* which then continues But much more importantly, the reader is left hanging waiting to finish the foot -ert begins. Near them, / on the sand,įirst of all, the line opens with a trochee. Hints to come, however, occur as early as the third line, which scans: This is a fairly standard - albeit atmospheric - iambic couplet. Who said, / Two vast / and trunk- / less legs / of stone I met / a trav– / ler from / an an– / tique land We see “Ozymandias”, like so many sonnets, open in iambic pentameter: In fact, the manner in which he does so, with the scansion variance correlating to the poem’s emotional climax, is arguably a commentary on meter itself (especially in light of the metric breakdown that occurred in poetry’s avant-garde over the latter half of the 19th century). Shelley was a master of meter, and in “Ozymandias” he purposefully breaks and reforms his meter to achieve the effect he’s looking for. Nearly every line from the poem is highly quotable, and this is no accident. However, in doing so, these analyses miss another level on which “Ozymandias” is successful: it is a technical masterpiece. This is not necessarily a bad thing: “Ozymandias” is a poem of sublime lyric power, and the lyric mode has always been emotionally-focused. Most analyses of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” - as is common in the Romantic and post-Romantic schools of poetic analysis - focus almost exclusively on emotion and imagery. ![]()
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