The Importance Of Pride In 'Ozymandias' By Percy Bysshe Shelley

“Ozymandias” is a poem written by Percy Bysshe Shelley. In this poem the speaker is someone who meets a traveler who talks about what he saw when he travelled to an “Antique Land”. This antique land just so happens to be Egypt. Many of us know of Egypt as a place far from here that is in the scorching dessert and has miles and miles of grainy sand, also with a couple of pyramids and the famous Sphinx, a statue of a huge lion. This traveler talks about a disfigured statue he spots on his journey. All that is left standing of this statue are two huge legs. He spots the head that has the face shattered. Although it’s shattered his expression can clearly been seen. He is frowning, has a wrinkled lip, and a possible sneer. As the traveler continues …show more content…
Pride is a high opinion of one’s own, importance, merit, or superiority, either shown mentally or through the things someone owns. Pride is shown throughout this poem when it mentions his inscription and how big his statue his. How big should the average statue be? Well Ozymandias isn’t the average man. He was a “King of Kings”, as he puts it. He was someone who clearly had a lot of power. Enough to get a huge statue built of himself. He was possibly proud of who he was. I would include cockiness and momentousness in the description of Ozymandias. The facial expression on this shattered figure shows that he’s not happy. Maybe the sculpture doesn’t look like how he pictured it to look or the size isn’t big or small enough. However he could have just been agitated with how long it took to complete. Back in those days they didn’t have cameras or anything to create a fast copy of such images, so when creating things such as paintings or sculptures it takes weeks or even months to finish. The people who were in the artwork had to stand still or sit still for how every long while it gets completed. So it was kind of known for there to be little imperfections here and there on those art …show more content…
Someone could have a portrait painted of them and after a while the painting starts to get dusty and the paint could possibly chip off or start to fade. Most of these affects happened because of the climate and what the weather wants to do. When discussing Ozymandias he had his statue built in the dessert that is full of sand. He also had other works of art built surrounding his statue, according to his inscription. What happened to everything and how did the statue crumble to pieces? I believe the answer to that would be, time and the weather. Nothing last forever. It’s so much sand in the dessert that it could have easily covered everything. There are so many sand storms and months without water, I believe it was just a matter of time that his accomplishments would be buried in the sand, or underwater, just like those that came before him. An example of how the weather and time affects objects would be the great City of Atlantis, which is now fully covered in