After nature there is the sculpture of Ramesses, which will always have some part of it left, but with time gets buried in sand (which is part of nature). In this case the ideal is eternal life, and even though all the characters in the poem aspire to it, only nature succeeds. We can understand it by the last line: “The lone and level sands stretch far away.” this line says that even after the sculpture disappears (as well as all the other characters.) Nature will always exist, and throughout the entire world.Īnother way to look at the poem is through a philosophical lens: Plato claimed that everything has an ideal that it aspires to be. The 6th character is in fact nature itself.
The last character is in fact the least ephemeral one, and the most hidden one. The reader receives the information about the sculpture by reading about it, but does not pass it on. After understanding that the closer one is to art, the farther away he is from being ephemeral, it is possible to analyze the reader and the 6 th character. The narrator (who is also the poet) is not as ephemeral as the traveler, because he does something more important than only talking about the sculpture – he creates art (the poem) himself that testifies about art (the sculpture). The only thing that he does that lives beyond him is telling the narrator about the sculpture. He may be considered a muse for the poem himself, thereby leaving art after him, but he is just a small and not a central element of the poem. Another character is the traveler, who is very ephemeral because he only talks about the statue, leaving no art behind. In this case, Ramesses is like the sculptor, because he is living through the sculpture, because he is the muse of this piece of art. The second longest living thing is the one who makes the art, in this case the sculptor, because he will live through his art, but his art can still stand without him. This shows that opposed to people, art will live forever. The sculpture, however, isn’t “dead”, even if only pieces of it remain. As mentioned before, the main theme of this poem is timelessness, and the characters show why: even though Ramesses II (on whom Ozymandias is based) was a great king with a lot of money and power, he eventually died. Because I have already clarified who the easily recognizable characters are, I can use them to understand the theme.
In order to understand the aforementioned reader and 6th character, we need to understand the main theme of the poem. In the poem there is possibly a 6th character, whom I’ll discuss later. He writes this as if Ozymandias says it, but the works mentioned are in fact the sculptor’s works, or at least specifically the sculpture discussed.
But the sculptor wrote something else on the statue: “‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'” The sculptor’s decision to write this leads us to the understanding that the sculptor is a character in the poem as well. By writing this on the pedestal, the sculptor reminds to whom ever sees the sculpture that it is the immortalization of Ozymandias. It is possible to understand better why the sculpture is Ozymandias’ spirit by this quote: “And on the pedestal these words appear: “‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings'”. This particular sculpture, though, still lives, even if it is half sunk. By ever – living spirit, I mean that by creating a sculpture of someone (in this case Ozymandias), he will live forever, or at least until the sculpture is destroyed. Of course, the sculpture is not a character, but the ever – living spirit of Ozymandias himself. The next character revealed is the sculpture of Ozymandias: “Half sunk, a shattered visage lies”. This is unclear at first sight, but more on that later. The interesting thing is that the reader really is meeting these characters, and by that becomes a character himself. At the start of the poem, the reader meets the narrator and the traveler speaking. One of the artistic methods used in the poem is the lack of clarity about the characters in the poem. I’ll do this to understand the main theme of the poem, which is timelessness. In this paper I’ll analyze the poem through artistic methods used, and philosophical lenses. The poem is about a statue of Ramesses II found in the desert by a traveler. Ozymandias is a short poem written by the British poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1818.
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