Shelley, Ozyandias and me
In ninth grade, my English class read Shelley's "Ozymandias" (I've copied the poem below, for reference). Our teacher (I still remember, decades later) thought the poem was an example of "irony". Yuk, yuk. Ozymandias thought his works would lead other great kings to despair, because they could never be equaled.
Yet look at them now -- the "shattered visage" and the "trunkless legs".
My English teacher was right -- in a way. But it seems to me that she missed the point of the poem, and that she fell into a pedagogical error common to many educators. She wanted to teach her students the jargon of literature. What is the literary technique called "irony"? Having done a short turn at pedagogy myself, I'm not totally unsympathetic. Teaching jargon makes testing the students easy. You merely ask them to define terms, and they are either right or wrong.
Unfortunately literary jargon is boring, and force feeding it to students is dull. In addition, the irony involved in the ruins of Ozymandias's colossal sculpture hardly explains the virtues of Shelley's poem. Of course works of art fade with time, and monuments turn into ruins. We all know that. But the virtue of the poem is the mood it creates. First, it is a story told by a traveler to an "antique land". Travel is romantic -- and stories about travel are romantic.
Second, the picture of the mysterious, gigantic head, and the two legs create a romantic mystery in the mind of the reader. The dry, sterile desert air has both preserved and destroyed the sculpture.
Finally -- and most important -- we see not only the sculpture, but Ozymandias himself. The passions which "yet survive" in the "wrinkled lip" of the visage were, perhaps, those of the King. And why should the mighty not despair? Are they capable, mighty as they are, of Oymandias's hubris? His gigantic statue might be a ruin, but his pride and his glory remain "stamped" indelibly on the pedestal. Was Shelley suggesting that words (poetry, perhaps) outlive sculptures?
I was only 14 (or so) in that English class. But I already knew (and argued with my teacher) that irony was hardly the greatest virtue of Shelley's poem. Or if it is, the irony is not that Ozymandias was mistaken in thinking that the mighty might despair of being able to equal him, but that he was correct.
Quote:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".
