CRITICAL OF TIME AND NATURE BY THE SESTET OF OZYMANDIAS

"CRITICAL OF TIME AND NATURE BY THE SESTET OF OZYMANDIAS "

INTRODUCTION
Ozymandias is a poem written by Percy Shelley. It was published in January of 1818 in The Examiner. This poem is an Italian sonnet, a I4-line poem. The rhyme scheme is ababacdcedefef. The sonnet consists of oktave (the first eight lines) and sestet (the last six lines). The poem is about a person who met a traveler in the desert and was told about a statue. In this context,the traveler is a book,and the person is the reader of that book. The statue represents Ozymandias, an Egyptian Pharaoh. Ozymandias is an arrogant king who considered himself as the most powerful and superior being. In the sestet, through the inscription on the pedestal of his statue, Ozymandias portrays how he is so arrogant by saying that he is the king of kings, and that no one could be equal to him nor his works no matter how hard he/she may try. However, statue of the king is now only a colossal wreck. In this paper, we are trying to analyze the poem through its message. However, our focus here is not the message exactly,but how the author implicitly express the message through time and nature. And since the message is in the sestet,we are limiting our focus to the sestet.
DISCUSSION
From the sestet we know that the author is trying to say that the king cannot be immortal, even by creating a great and huge statue of himself. However, the author doesn’t explicitly tell us the message. Why so? Because he wants us to figure out what the message is by ourselves.
We will first analyze how the author expresses that implicit message. By the word “implicit”, we can figure out that the author uses other things to express the message. What are those other things?
We will now analyze the first three lines of the sestet. The traveler tells us about the inscription written on the remaining pedestal of legs of the statue,which we finally know who that statue represents. The inscription portrays the arrogance and vanity of Ozymandias about himself and his works because he thought there’s nobody as great as him,nobody that could do the works like he did. If others might try to be equal to him or his works,Ozymandias simply told them to give up because it would be impossible.
Then,we will see the analysis of the last three lines of the sestet . there we are told how the pride of Ozymandias has been disproved. By saying the king of kings, we can interprete that he considered himself as immortal,but he’s mortal anyway, and the statue of him which was meant to never be broken is now in ruin. Nothing is left of him but that broken statue. His pride,his power,his civilization have now gone. Even the head of him in his statue is now lying in the sand. The traveler makes it more ironic by describing the situation of the place where that statue exists. It was a desolate and barren desert in which the only thing remains is that broken statue.
From the analysis of the sestet above, we think that “those other things” the author uses to express the message is the “time” and “nature”. Why we choose time and nature?
We will analyze “time” first. See the word “decay” in the fourth line of the sestet. The word “decay” implies that the statue has been decomposed and broken slowly over a long period of time,and will continue that way until the statue is completely broken. From this analysis,we know that the author uses time to express the message. Moreover, the time here also implies that it is more powerful than the king and his statue because it can make the statue decayed and broken,and also reduce his arrogance to nothingness.
Then,we will see the analysis of “nature”. See how after time played its role,it’s nature’s turn to prove that she’s more powerful than the statue. Why do we say this? See the last line of the sestet, “The lone and level sands stretch far away”. This line represents the nature. We mean that after the statue is broken down, the nature (lone and level sands) embodied the broken parts of the statue. What’s more interesting here is that the author mentions that the sands are lone. Why does he say “lone” while he knows there’s still the unbroken part of the statue? Here we assume that the nature sees the statue as a highly insignificant thing that’s not worth mentioning. However, we are also curious to find out why nature sees it as a very insignificant thing. Here we have two assumptions about our curiousity. The first assumption derived from the short story entitled “The Law of Life” by Jack London. There’s a sentence in that story says “She had no concern for that concrete thing called the individual. Her interest lay in the species, the race”. The word “she” in that sentence refers to nature. The sentence means that nature doesnt care about individual,she only cares about human race. This is quite a similar case with Ozymandias, We know that the statue is the only thing in the desert, so it means the statue is an individual. That’s why nature let the statue be embodied in the sands.. Our second assumption is is that the nature wants to punish the statue for its arrogance by saying that he’s king of kings
CONCLUSION
In conclusion,this sestet tells us how the author express the implicit message through other things like time and nature. We can infer that time and nature are more powerful than the king, because the statue is broken eventually as time passed,and nature makes half of the face buried in the sand and all that people can see are nothing but sands stretching for miles because nature wants to punish the statue for his arrogance.