Respuesta :
In “Ozymandias,” Percy Shelley explores the theme of the futility of power and might, and contrasts it with the immortality of art. He uses three narrators to tell the events of the poem. The poem is a frame story. The reader first encounters the main narrator. Shelley begins the poem by talking about how the narrator met the traveler:
I met a traveler from an antique land,
Who said—"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone”
At this point, the narrative shifts to the second speaker, the traveler. The traveler’s main function within the poem is to give us, the readers, the setting. He describes the desolate landscape in which he saw the ruins of a once-glorious empire. Through him, Shelley prepares us for the emotional impact of Ozymandias’s final words. It is through him that we get a description of Ozymandias’s power and pride:
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Through the traveler's description, we realize that while Ozymandias's power, symbolized by the ruins of his statue, has faded, the art of the unknown sculptor who captures his expression survives:
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The narrative voice shifts once again, and we hear Ozymandias’s words:
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
After one has read the traveler’s description of the ruins, Ozymandias’s words come across as pathetic and ironic, which is Shelley’s intention. He uses the word despair in Ozymandias’s boasting to his enemies. However the same despair could now be used to describe Ozymandias’s degraded state. At the climax of the poem, we recognize the irony of the fact that the once-great ruler Ozymandias is now unknown, and we get the only information we have of him from a stranger. So, by using narrative shifts, Percy Shelley increases the final emotional impact of the poem.
The irony of the fact that Ozymandias, a once-famous monarch, is now unknown and that the only information we have about him comes from a stranger is made clear to us at the poem's finale.
What was the overall effect of Ozymandias?
The narrator tells the story of meeting a traveler from an ancient land who told him of a statue ruin in the desert of his own nation. Two enormous stone legs are "half-sunk" in the sand next to a big, rotting stone head.
According to the traveller, the sculpture's frown and "sneer of chilly authority" demonstrate that the sculptor understood the subject's emotions or "passions."
Both the sculptor and his subject have since passed away, yet their emotions are still "imprinted" on the dead statue.
The irony and melancholy tone of Ozymandias's speech is deliberate on Shelley's part. In his boasting to his foes, Ozymandias used the phrase "despair." However, Ozymandias's deteriorated condition can now be described by the same dread.
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https://brainly.com/question/20393454
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