When an individual thinks of power, the individual may have set definitions or views varying from facts, opinions, and experiences that the individual may have encountered. Nonetheless, in the poem “Ozymandias,” Percy Bysshe Shelley shows the truth of power and how one can be affected by it. Thus, in the process presents the impact of power, the extent to which it goes to, and the reality of its existence with an individual. Therefore, further disclosing that power is merely mortal, for it fades away and eventually ceases to be of reality like all transitory substances. Thus, the impact of power is shown through the traveler’s actions in the beginning of the poem. For, when the traveler describes what they have seen in, “an antique land”, they reveal how power fades with time (Shelley 232). However, there are not only the actions of the traveler in the beginning, for there is also the imagery; an example being, “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone/Stand in the desert…. Near them, on the sand, /Half sunk a shattered visage lies,” (232). Hence, the speaker tells how there once was a huge statue that represented power, which now is broken and …show more content…
Thus, the alliterations in, “sneer of cold command,” and “Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,” explain how the statue and its sculptor depict the amount of power that the statue may have held in the ancient times its power was at its maximum (232). Nevertheless, though, there are also areas of imagery in the midsection that the speaker said, such as, “lifeless things, /The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;” which demonstrate how the power which the representation of the sculpture meant to leave behind is not of existence (232). Rather, the “passions read” that are attached to the sculptor and sculpture are the only fragments of the ‘lifeless things”