Ozymandias and The Prelude

• Both Shelley’s Ozymandias and Wordsworth’s The Prelude highlight the sublime and overwhelming power of nature, and humankind’s inability to impact forces beyond its control
• Similarities:

  Topic sentence - Both poems display nature as more powerful than mankind
• Similarities:

  • In Ozymandias, human power is shown as intrinsically weak and transient, lost to time and nature
  • Meanwhile, in The Prelude, failed attempts of mankind to overpower and manipulate a force beyond its control are displayed
  • Similarly, both poems express this power of nature through the use of  Personification
  • The theme of pride is key in both, it being the cause of the subjects’ eventual fall
• Differences:

  
  

  Topic sentence - While both poets explore how pride is unfounded because human power is inferior to the power of nature, they present this in different ways
• Differences:

  • In Ozymandias, this power is conveyed through the symbolism of the desert and time
  • On the other hand, in The Prelude, the overwhelming power of nature leads to the speaker’s loss of eloquence and how he becomes unable to define his world
  • There are also significant differences in form and structure, with Ozymandias being a sonnet and The Prelude an epic poem