Power and conflict poetry ~

• Who is ozymandias poet?

  Percy Bysshe Shelley.
• What type of poet was Shelley?

  Percy Bysshe Shelley was a romantic poet, who only really became famous after his death. He wrote ozymandias in 1817, after hearing about how an Italian explorer had retrieved the statue from the desert.
• What is the poem about?

  The narrator meets a traveller who tells him about a statue standing in the middle of the desert. It’s a statue of a king who ruled over a past civilisation. His face is proud and he arrogantly boasts about how powerful he is in an inscription on the statues base. However the statue has fallen down and crumbled away so that only the ruins remain.
• Ozymandias form…

  The poem is a sonnet, with a turning point (Volta) at line 9 like a Petrarchan sonnet. However it doesn’t follow a regular sonnet rhyme scheme, perhaps reflecting the way that human power and structures can be destroyed. It uses iambic pentameter, but this is also often disrupted. The story is a second hand account, which distances the reader even further from the dead king.
• Ozymandias structure~

  The narrator builds up an image of the statue by focusing on different parts of it in turn. The poem ends by describing the enormous desert, which helps to sum up the insignificance of the statue.