humans

• humans abuse their power (COMH)

  • 'bandage up me eye with me own history'

  'bandage' - verb - suggests wounded, people who educate wound him by not teaching him about his own history

  'me' - pronoun - repeated throughout shows how it is personal to him

  'eye' - deliberately being shielded from his own history

  'me own history' - his heritage

  • 'blind me to me own identity'
• humans don't last but their actions do (have the power to influence those after) (COMH)

  white people - story people, morals live on;

  • Dick Wittington' - poor boy (nothing but a cat) - mayor of London
  • 'cow that jumped over the moon'
  • 'robin hood'

  nursery rhymes - mock white heritage (make it seem fictional)

  black people (italics);

  • Mary Seacole - Jamaican nurse ('healing star', 'yellow sunrise' - hope)
  • Toussaint - French revolution but switched sides when Haiti was captured - lead to the Haitian revolution - gets repeated (sounds like a chant)
• COMH - structure

  • no punctuation - defies those who try to force the English culture on to him --- short lines = anger
  • rhyme - forces black and white historical figure into one segment many times - builds up rhyme and climaxes final lines to emphasise that Agard wants us to think about black history
  • stanza's - line ends with black figures - Toussaint, Mary Seacole, Nanny de Marron
  • enjambment - doesn't follow rules = rush - criticizes the education system
  • nature imagery = positive - natural instinct for these black people to be great and how they naturally influenced Agard
• COMH - context

  • Agard - born in Guyana 1949, moved to England 1977, grew up in Eurocentric education as Guyana was a colony
  • Nanny de Marron - made predictions that saved people from slavery - she had visions and could see into the future - 'see-far woman'
  • Shaka de great Zulu - lead the Zulu people which kept the British colonisers out (they thought the tribe was stupid) by attacking them
  • Mary Seacole - a black nurse in the Crimean war - was rejected by the British army so went via the Caribbean - saved many lives
• power makes humans arrogant (Ozy)

  • 'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, Look upon my art ye mighty and despair'

  'King of Kings' - alliteration - calling himself a God (God chose kings)

  'look' - imperative

  'ye mighty' - those who have the most power

  'despair' - fear

  'my art' - arrogant as he believes a statue of himself is art
• human power is temporary (Ozy)

  • 'Lone and level sand stretched far away'

  'lone and level' - alliteration

  'sand stretched' - sibilance

  the phrase shows nature has outlived the statue

  • 'boundless and bare' - alliteration

  shows how stature (and Ozymandias) have had no effect on the dessert

  • 'who said two vast and trunkless legs of stone'

  the stature is broken - half of it stands

  'vast' - adjective shows size

  'trunkless' - broken
• Ozymandias structure

  • sonnet - octave = problem, volta (9), sestet = solution (nature removed the remembrance of the statue)
  • ABBA rhyme scheme but Ozymandias is ABABCDEDEFEF - not traditional - shows how humans power will always be replaced by someone else
  • negative words - 'sunk', 'shattered', 'frown', 'wrinkled', 'sheer' - attacks those in power
  • 'cold command' - fricative alliteration - sounds like cutting
  • irony - Ozymandias expects his name to remembered - empire = waste - broken stature is all that remains
• Ozymandias context

  Shelley

  • pacifist
  • atheists - got him expelled from university as he didn't believe in God
  • drowned sailing to Italy
  • political
  • Romantic poet - embraced the natural world - love supernatural - romanticised the French revolution
  • romantic poetry time period - King George III - lot of conflict - costly - people in GB = poor, angry, wanted; the gov's help, cheap food, fair wages, reassurance that machines wouldn't take their jobs