quote recall

• "I met a traveller from an antique land

  Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone"

  • enjambment
• "Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown

  And wrinkled lip, and a sneer of cold command"

  • personification
  • negative semantic field around power
  • irony that he had so much vanity in his appearance that he ordered It to be encapsulated which instead captures his cruelty and indifference.
• "stamped on these lifeless things"

  • remainder of his lust for power
• "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

  Look on my works, ye Mighty and despair!"

  • judicious use of dramatic irony communicates a sense of inevitably towards the breakdown of power
  • irony
  • imperative verb "despair"
• "Nothing beside remains."

  • mockery on human power
  • ridicules his pride over enjoying the brutality and being a tyrannical leader, which he saw to be synonymous with power when in actuality it is the anthesis
  • end stops
• "Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

  the lone and level sands stretch far away."

  • contrasts human notions of pride and omnipotence with nature to emphasise they pale in comparison to nature's transcendence
  • alliteration emphasises the vast and mighty extent of nature
  • echoes sentiment that everything that has come from earth must return to it
• "The lone and level sands stretch far away."

  • end stops (more frequent towards the end of the poem)
  • create a sense of finality, reaffirming how the only element of certainty there is regarding power is that of nature
  • may symbolise how human power is transient and easily curtailed by natures omnipotence