Literary Analysis of Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Analyzing Shelley’s “Ozymandias”
P.B. Shelley’s “Ozymandias” is not a traditional sonnet; rather, it functions as a narrative sonnet employing multiple narrative voices. The poem features a frame narrative with three distinct narrators. We encounter a narrator who recounts what another person told him, and that person, in turn, relates what he read. The primary purpose of these layered narrators is to evoke an uncanny feeling, challenging the reader’s belief and aligning with characteristics of Gothic literature.
Gothic Narrative Elements
- Unreliable Narrator: The shifting perspectives create doubt.
- Historical Setting: A place imbued with a past, even if desolate.
- The Uncanny: A sense of unsettling familiarity or strangeness.
The poem blends seemingly disparate elements, such as a ruined statue and allusions to literary “kings of kings” like Shakespeare and Spenser, to create a sense of incongruity. Three significant literary devices are evident in “Ozymandias”:
Key Literary Devices in “Ozymandias”
- Ellipsis: The skipping of information or time, creating gaps in the narrative.
- Isochrony: A scene in the poem takes the same time to read as it would in real life, best exemplified by dialogue. This refers to the actual time passing, mirroring the reading time.
- Dilation: Extending time through the extensive use of enumeration, detailed descriptions, or other rhetorical techniques. Time sequence is deliberately manipulated.
Timelessness and Spatial Ambiguity in “Ozymandias”
The poem is deliberately not set in a specific time or space, rendering it lifeless, spaceless, and timeless. This approach aligns with the concept of the poetry of the eternal, where Shelley focuses on an ancient hero rather than contemporary social concerns. By stripping away specific temporal and spatial anchors, the poem distills its message to its essential core.
The frequent use of adjectives ending in ‘-less’ (e.g., “lifeless,” “spaceless,” “timeless”) contributes to a feeling of mockery towards the self-proclaimed “king of kings.” This formal choice mirrors the poem’s thematic content: just as the ruined statue mocks the king’s transient power, Shelley’s unconventional sonnet form subtly mocks established literary genres and figures, implicitly challenging the authority of literary “kings” like Shakespeare and Spenser.
Poetic Form and Shelley’s Artistic Intent
Coleridge might describe “Ozymandias” as a poem of fancy. The poem’s unusual rhyme scheme mirrors its central theme. Shelley deliberately deviates from traditional sonnet patterns, perhaps suggesting that the narrator’s memory is unreliable or that Shelley himself prioritizes artistic expression over strict adherence to convention, seemingly unconcerned with the reader’s expectations for a perfect sonnet. Through the decaying statue, Shelley illustrates how even the most powerful “kings of kings” ultimately lose their significance.
Pleasure, Pain, and the Transformative Power of Poetry
Defining pleasure in its highest sense is complex, often involving apparent paradoxes. Our sympathy in tragic fiction, for instance, stems from the principle that tragedy delights by offering a shadow of the pleasure found in pain. This paradox is also the source of the melancholy often inseparable from the sweetest melody.
Similar to William Blake’s “The Tyger,” Shelley suggests that there is a divine or Platonic order that humans cannot fully comprehend through the filter of consciousness. This state of numbness towards imagination can lead to melancholy, where pleasure is found even in pain, perhaps akin to a transcendent, almost drug-like experience of heightened sensation.
Shelley’s Platonic Vision of Poetry
For Shelley, poetry possesses the power to transform all things into loveliness. It exalts the beauty of what is already beautiful and adds beauty to what is deformed. Poetry marries seemingly opposing concepts: exultation and horror, grief and pleasure, eternity and change. It transmutes everything it touches, and every form within its radiant presence is changed by a wondrous sympathy into an incarnation of the spirit, an embodiment of ideas, transforming them from potentially dangerous concepts into sources of beauty.
As Shelley famously stated, “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.” For Shelley, a Platonic order of ideas exists, and the poet works to approximate this order. The ability to perceive and appreciate this approximation is what he terms ‘taste.’ For Plato, this ultimate order is inherently beautiful.