Ozymandias

• Ozymandias literally means ruler of air which indicates Ramses is ruler of nothing but everything as air is everywhere
• The statue is a symbolism of Ramses power and now it's broken, his power is gone
• 'antique land' refers to Egypt
• 'sneer of cold command'...

  1. Ozymandias is a tyrant and ruled harshly which shows he previously had power but only over men
• 'sculptor well those passions read'

  1. The sculptor understood ozymandias' nature and here we get a third account of the ruler from the sculptor
• 'the hand that mocked'

  1. Referring to the sculptor(s) mocking ozymandias' nature
  2. The tyrants hand mocked the sculptors
• 'my name is ozymandias'

  1. We get a direct quote from him with this being the fourth account. We see this through the use of quotation marks.
• 'king of kings'

  1. Biblical reference to show ozymandias compares himself to god as being the worthiest of kings which shows his arrogance and ego
• 'look on my works ye mighty and despair'

  1. Irony seeing as directly afterwards it says 'nothing beside remains' showing that as his 'works' are destroyed by the power of nature, so is his relevance but we question why there's poems being wrote about him if he's irrelevant
• 'colossal wreck'

  1. Oxymoron to show what was once a great accomplishment in his eyes is now just a wreck that nature easily destroyed
• 'boundless and bare / lone and level'

  1. Alliteration to emphasise that his relevance is no longer
• This poem is a sonnet which is typically a love poem to show how much he loves nature
• Percy Shelley was a romantic poet
• There's no rhyming couplets in the sonnet which is considered 'breaking rules' to show his understanding of nature is beyond human consideration
• 'shattered visage'

  1. His tyrancy that showed his power is now gone