Sonnet "Ozymandias" by P.B. Shelley

Skryabin Valentin Yurievich ORCID: 0000-0002-4942-8556 PhD in Medicine Associate Professor, Department of Narcology, FGBOU DPO RMANPO of the Ministry of Health of Russia 109390, Russia, g. Moscow, ul. Lyublinskaya, 37/1 sardonios@yandex.ru

The history of writing the sonnet. In 1817, the British Museum announced the acquisition from the traveler William Hamilton of the fragments of the statue of the young Memnon, the heir to the Egyptian throne, who in 1279-1213 BC was to rule under the name of Ramesses II and achieve the maximum expansion of his power [Zhatkin, Ryabova, 2011]. Ramesses II was one of the most powerful rulers of the ancient world and reigned as Pharaoh for more than 60 years, leading the Egyptians to numerous military victories and accumulating huge reserves of wealth. Subsequently, Ramesses II became known as Ramesses the Great and was revered for centuries after his death. In commemoration of his victories and greatness, Ramesses II ordered to carve an inscription on the pedestal of the obelisk in Luxor. The ancient Greek name of Ramesses II "Ozymandias" (Greek. , from the Greek. ozium – air and Lat. mandate – to rule, to make a law; thus, "Ozymandias" is the "pharaoh ruling the air") [Pepanyan, 2019].In the I century BC, the historian Diodorus Siculus visited Egypt and found the colossus of Ozymandias collapsed and half buried in sand, however, the inscription on it remained distinguishable: "King of Kings am I, Osymandias.

If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works" [Diodorus Siculus, 1814] ("I am the King of Kings, Ozymandias. If anyone finds out how great I am and where I rest, may he surpass any of my creations"). Diodorus cites this text in the first book of his "Historical Library", in which he described the geography, culture and history of Ancient Egypt [Dudko, 2019]. At the same time, the description of the fragments of the sculpture left by the historian is striking in its stinginess: "From the first tombs, where, as they say, the so-called concubines of Jupiter (Ammon) were buried, the monument of King Ozymandias was in ten stages. <...> There was an entrance to another peristyle, similar in everything to the first one, and differing from it only in carved images. It contained three statues made of solid Sienese granite. One of them, sitting, was the greatest in all Egypt; her legs were more than seven cubits. The other two were kneeling at her knees, depicting a mother and daughter <...> There was another statue, of a mother, to the side; three crowns on her head meant that she was a daughter, a wife and a mother" [Norov, 2012].

Another description of the statue resting in the Egyptian sands, more close to the time of the British romantic poets, was left in 1834-35 by the Russian traveler Abraham Norov: "The greatest colossus in the world is defeated, forked, with limbs scattered everywhere, like the idol Dagon. It is difficult to comprehend the entire volume of it, and one must step back to recognize this elegant granite monster. The name of Sesostris, who shook the ancient world with his victories, is inscribed on his ramen. This colossus is the one on which there was an inscription: "I am Ozymandias, King of Kings; whoever wants to be as great as I am, let him see where I rest and surpass what I have created" [Norov, 2012]. According to the description left by the traveler Norov, the width of the shoulders of the colossus is three fathoms (6.48 meters), the length of the big toe is 3 3?4 (1.125 meters). The pedestal on which the statue stood was 21?2 fathoms (4.32 meters) high.

       After learning about the imminent arrival in England of the wreckage of the statue of Ramesses II (which, however, happened only four years later, in 1821, and the installation of the statue in the hall of the British Museum – in May 1834), Percy Bysshe Shelley and Horace Smith, who worked as his financial manager, decided to arrange a friendly competition. The poets agreed to compose a sonnet dedicated to the colossus, and wrote on December 26-28, 1817, two sonnets with the same name – "Ozymandias". On January 11, 1818, the newspaper "The Examiner" published "Sonnet. Ozymandias" by Glirastes (Percy Shelley was hiding under a pseudonym), and on February 1 — "To find a huge granite foot standing alone in the deserts of Egypt, with the message given below", dedicated to the poet Shelley and signed with the initials H.S. [Dudko, 2019].

Attentive readers of that time might have noticed that Glirastes is not a name borrowed from history or classical literature. However, clues about the meaning of this pseudonym did not appear for at least 130 years, until in 1948 Karl Pforzheimer acquired previously unpublished letters to Mary Shelley written while she was Mary Godwin. In letters written in April 1815 to P.B. Shelley's friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Mary Godwin repeatedly calls herself "sonya", and from the text of the letters it becomes obvious that this was one of her household names. She even signs the letters as "Your loving Sonya" and "Runaway Sonya" (nine months before she left Shelly), and in one of the letters she even drew a little sonya. As it turned out, the word Glirastes is an example of a combination of Shelley's authorship (like the "wallet words" from the works of Lewis Carroll), combining the Greek suffix -erastes, meaning "lover", and the Latin name of the dormouse family Gliridae. The signature Glirastes (i.e., "sonya's lover"), put by Shelley under the published poem, apparently was a joke and a demonstration of his affection for Mary [Carter, 2018].

The structure of the sonnet and the poetic techniques used. The poem "Ozymandias" is a sonnet that consists of fourteen lines and is written in iambic pentameter. Although, in general, iambic pentameter sounds more natural than other poetic sizes, it still has a fairly purposeful rhythm that makes it easy to distinguish it from ordinary speech. The sonnet as a poetic form originated in Italian love poetry and was popularized by Shakespeare. Most sonnets are divided into two parts: "octet" (the first eight lines) and "sextet" (the last six lines), with the second part commenting on the first. Thus, most sonnets follow the pattern of ABBAABBA and CDECDE or CDCDCD. In contrast, "Ozymandias" has an unusual rhyming scheme: ABABA CDCEDEFEF. However, this was not unusual for the author: out of seventeen completed sonnets, Shelley does not have any traditional in form [Pepanyan, 2019]. The English poet deliberately violated the established form in order to give the poems additional expressiveness. In Shelley's Ozymandias, all fourteen lines are connected in one stanza, while the first part of the sonnet sets the narrative, and then describes the statue, and the second part ironically plays off the words of the ruler and gives a description of the desert environment.

Sonnets have long been a standard poetic form, and it was an obvious choice for Shelley and Smith to use them for their competition, since sonnets have a given structure, but still leave the poet a lot of freedom. Shelley uses a number of poetic techniques in the text of his sonnet. Let's briefly analyze the main ones.

The first is the actual language of the narrative. Ozymandias calls himself the "king of kings", which plays on a phrase taken from the Biblical language: "His name is written on His clothes and on His thigh: "The king of kings and the Lord of lords"..." (Rev 19:16), "They will fight with the Lamb, and the Lamb will overcome them; for He is the Lord of lords and the King of kings, and those who are with Him are called and chosen and faithful..." (Rev.17:14). This may mean that the subsequent overthrow of Ozymandias was a punishment from God: moreover, Shelley raised such a topic in several of his other poems.

Another important feature of the sonnet's language is that it is not written in an exalted style: the author uses only two words of high style: "visage" and "Mighty", as well as one archaic word "ye". In the sixth line of the sonnet, Shelley uses the inversion technique in the phrase "well those passions read" instead of the correct "read those passions well". Shelley repeats the rhymes of the ninth, eleventh and thirteenth lines three times (eee), because not only are the rhymes close to each other in sound (appear /despair/bare), but also at the beginning of the thirteenth line Shelley mentions the statue ("that colossal wreck"), which is a continuation of the lines about the pedestal. In addition, the rhyme of the seventh and tenth lines (dd) is repeated twice – "on lifeless things" and "king of kings", thereby emphasizing the "lifeless" (lifeless) state of the King of Kings.

There are several examples of alliteration in Ozymandias: for example, the author uses this technique already in the first lines of the sonnet, emphasizing the sound of the sounds t, l and s: "met a traveler / antique land / said two vast and trunkless <...> stone, stand <...> sand". Thus, the poet emphasizes the arrogance of the statue. Other examples of alliteration are the phrases "cold command" (c-c) and "boundless and bare" (b-b), as well as "my name is Ozymandias (m-n-m-m-n), king of kings (k-k)". The repetition used in alliteration makes the poetic sound more interesting, and also creates a calming rhythm as opposed to the tension caused by anjambeman.

Along with alliteration, Shelley also uses assonance, which occurs in the phrase "Half sunk a shattered visage lies", while repeating the short sound "a". In fact, the "a" sound is repeated throughout the poem in words such as "traveller", "antique", "vast" and even "Ozymandias" proper. Like alliteration, assonance is used to make a poem more interesting and enjoyable to listen to.

In the text of "Ozymandias" there is also an apostrophe – in the inscription on the pedestal of the statue: "My deeds, kings, behold – and despair!" [Bryusov, 1994] (here and further quotes are translated by Valery Bryusov). The apostrophe was especially common in older forms of poetry, referring readers to the literature of ancient Greece. Since Shelley used the ancient Greek text as inspiration for his poem, perhaps he decided to include in his sonnet the poetic techniques of this time period.

Another important technique used by Shelley is anjambeman, which creates the effect of a discrepancy between the syntactic and rhythmic structure of a poetic text due to the mismatch of the border of poetic lines with the border between syntagmas. There are numerous examples of Anjambeman in Ozymandias, for example, "Who said – "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone/Stand in the desert..." ("In the desert," he said, "two stone legs/They stand without a skeleton..."). In this part of the poem, Shelley uses the interweaving of anjambeman with another poetic device – caesura (a rhythmic pause dividing a line into parts). The pause here mimics the traveler's breathing before his narration, dramatizing the moment, as well as creating a distance between the description of the statue and the poet's retelling. The second caesura comes after the words "Stands in the desert" ("Stand without a skeleton"). This pause and the end of the sentence reinforce the sense of isolation surrounding these strange ruined legs. The last caesura repeats this effective technique, following the words "Nothing beside remains" ("There is nothing more"). This short, grammatically complete and isolated sentence stands inside the poem like a statue in the desert. At the same time, most of the rest of the text consists of long complex sentences that stretch like a desert or time itself.

Anjambeman is a way to build action and tension within a poem. The tension comes from the fact that the poet's thought is not finished at the end of the sentence. Each line with anjambeman is a mini–cliffhanger that makes the reader want to keep reading to find out what will happen next. Anjambeman can also create drama, especially when the next line does not carry what the reader expected.

Finally, Shelley's sonnet is full of irony, that is, the use of a certain tone of narration or exaggeration to convey a meaning opposite to the one voiced literally. The statue was destroyed: the legs remained standing in the sand, but the body fell, and the face "lies broken", "buried in the sand". The poet contrasts the boastful words of Ozymandias with the image of the fragments of his statue. Ozymandias could have been a powerful ruler when he ordered these words to be carved in stone, but the days of his power are long gone, and this boast now looks empty: his own face has not been preserved, let alone the empire he once ruled.

Framing the sonnet as a story told to the narrator by a traveler from the "forgotten land" allows Shelley to give a certain ambiguity to the image of Ozymandias for the reader. Instead of seeing the statue with our own eyes, we hear about it from someone who has heard about it from someone who has seen it. Thanks to this technique, the ancient king becomes even less formidable and imposing: the distancing of the narrative serves to undermine his authority and power as well as the passage of time.

At the same time, Ramesses' pride is obvious to the reader throughout the poem: from the boastful inscription where he declares himself "the king of kings" to the "folds of the lips curved haughtily" on his statue. However, "Ozymandias" makes it clear that every person, even the most powerful on earth, will eventually be overthrown, his name will be forgotten, and monuments testifying to his greatness will be buried in the sand. Thus, "Ozymandias" is, first of all, a metaphor for the ephemerality of political power, as well as pride and vanity in general.

Shelley's sonnet gained worldwide fame and is still quoted in popular culture. So, a fragment of the same poem – "My deeds, kings, behold — and despair!" is quoted in the horror film "Alien. Testament" by Ridley Scott. The fourteenth episode of the fifth season of the American television series Breaking Bad, which tells about the fall of the empire of the protagonist Walter White, was called "Ozymandias", and in the trailer for this episode Shelley's poem is fully quoted. Finally, Woody Allen, in his feature film Roman Adventures, introduces the term "Melancholy of Ozymandias": a diagnosis invented to describe the artist's awareness that ultimately his works have no meaning – after all, even the "eternal" classics will not survive the end of the world.

Conclusion. In general, in the poetry of Romanticism, descriptions of ruins are often found and are interesting in a kind of doubling of perspective, allowing the reader to feel at the same time a contemporary of both the narrator and the great builders of antiquity. However, the status of great historical figures in such cases is often in question, and "Ozymandias" is just such a textbook example.