Diction In Ozymandias

Ianna Brandt Mrs. Berg DC Lit and Comp 3 May 2024 The Failures of Legacy To many individuals, the influence they leave on the world matters more than their treatment of others in the moment. The Egyptian Pharaoh Ozymandias, also known as Rameses II, has many depictions in this fashion, of valuing his pride and ambitions more than those around him. However, the legacy left behind often falls short of what those people wanted to create or force them into a shell of themselves to fit current perceptions of them. In his poem, “Ozymandias,” Percy Shelley offers a moral lesson on ambition and pride through the implementation of commanding diction, an apathetic tone, and situational irony to highlight the shallow nature of legacy. The commanding diction Shelley creates serves to draw in the reader and
By giving the speaker that apathetic tone, Shelley also points out the distaste many have toward beacons of pride. Within the poem, Shelley makes it clear that Ozymandias had the statue made as a monument to all his other achievements, which, in many cases would cause a sense of wonder or amazement; however, the tone turns the reader away from those feelings and instead toward a realization of their pointlessness. “Nothing beside [the statue] remains” to attest to any of those achievements, nulling the meaning behind all of it. Without a basis to go on, actions mean nothing or lack enough meaning to conjure feeling in a subject, which Shelley depicts skillfully in “Ozymandias” through his apathetic tone. The “Ozymandias” slowly layers upon itself to add deeper meaning through the use of irony. Through situational irony, Shelley provides a backbone to comment on the inevitability of the situation. The poem begins with descriptions of a statue, now only “two vast trunkless legs of stone” and a “Half sunk.shattered forehead” standing in a vast and open desert (Lines 2,