Homework                                                                                      Task One:

The poem is about a person meeting a traveller from an ancient land, who tells a story about a ruin, which contains a sculpture of someone called Ozymandias. Ozymandias, it seems was a leader that ruled in fear. We know this from the quote “whose frown, and wrinkled lips and sneer of cold command” As well as telling us the sculpture was made with a negative expression. The sculpture was most likely made during his reign to mock his leadership over the people and to describe the person he was. Ozymandias’s quote on the pedestal described what he wanted to be remembered for, but the sculpture showed the actual way the majority of people felt about him.

I feel like the end of the poem sends out the message of bad karma. This is because Ozymandias’s character is betrayed very negatively. Different sentences say that he had different traits to his personality such as being full of himself. You would be able to understand this from the quote “look on my work, ye mighty, and despair”. What this quote says, is that he wants everyone that visits his sculpture to look at all the things he had created. By the word despair I feel like he is describing the emotion of all the people below him. It describes the way they have lost all hope in life and are just living as slaves, to work for a feared leader; who must have terrorized them. This is so they understand who he is and what he will do to the people of the land. He shows his status in the chain of leadership by quoting ‘king of kings’. The quote on the pedestal gave of the idea that he thought everything would still be there after his reign, instead his kingdom actually got destroyed and started to decay, so he ended up with his image, which had nothing to show except for two pillars and his sculpture. All the work he had created had been buried by tons of sand.

Time in the poem is shown by many words, but one word stood out the most out of the rest:  ‘Antique’ means an item worth something due to the age or quality of the item. The word antique is use in two ways in the poem. One way it is used is to describe the land. Antique isn’t an adjective, but is used as one because of its meaning. The second way it is used is to tell the reader that there is an artefact (sculpture) on the land. The word shows that there is a lot of history in the land that the traveller is from.

Another way that the poem shows time is that it is written in past tense, stating that the event had already happened; potentially a long time ago. Also some of the words like ‘survive’ and ‘decay’ are things that happen over a long period of time, so if the work of Ozymandias had decayed. We can conclude that his reign was quite a long time ago. ‘Survive’ mean to live or exist especially in danger or hardship. The case the people are in relates to living in hardship; as they lived in torturing condition and suffered doing work all the time non-stop. They had to survive which was a struggle for people, most likely due to Ozymandias’s power over the people and the things he forces them to do.

The word decay was essential when using a word to find a way to describe the change in time in the poem. This would be because ‘to decay’ is the process which something rots or decomposes. This means it is slowly disintegrating just like Ozymandias’s power did. This happened over a very long period of time and if Ozymandias’s work decayed until nothing was there.

At the start of the poem the text is written switching from past tense to present tense. I know it is in past tense at the start as the word ‘met’ is the past tense version of meet. The second line of the poem says ‘said’ which tell us the person had already said it in the past. The poet wrote the poem in a very confusing way. It is written in the past speaking about the past. But the poet played around with the text and changed it from past to present. This quote shows this ‘well those passions read, which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things’. ‘Survive’ is in present tense because the past tense of survive is survived. Whereas stamped is in past tense because the present tense of stamped is stamp.

More Ext:

In the travellers story there are different types of figurative language like personification and metaphors. The entire text itself has a pattern to it. It is called iambic pentameter, which is when each line of the poem has 10 syllables. The quote ‘legs of stone, stand in the desert’ is a type of personification because stone pillar don’t have legs. Another type of figurative language used was a hyperbole. Which is when something is over exaggerated? ‘Colossal wreck, boundless and bare’ is one of the quotes were hyperbole is used. This is because it implies that there was a lot of destruction that went on forever. This type of language gives the poem a stronger meaning. From the text its show Ozymandias was a king that thought highly about himself. He looked down on them and thought of them a nothing besides lifeless things. Shelley wants the reader to think about a powerful leader, who now only has a statue to represent the power he had. I feel like Shelley wanted all the thing Ozymandias earned would stay for everyone to see and the things he didn’t earn would be destroyed and covered up by tons of sand. This to me show what things as a leader he deserved to have as reverence to his reign.