The loss of two stone legs is huge,
Standing in the desert. The sand nearby is half buried.
The face of the broken stone statue-frowning eyebrows,
There was a dignified sneer at his mouth,
This shows that sculptors have a deep feeling for these expressions.
Reprint on a lifeless stone and make it live.
Beyond the sculptor's hand and sneering heart.
A line of vague words appeared on the pedestal:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings.
In the face of my achievements, the earth hero will be ashamed and desperate! "
Other than that, there is nothing. In this huge
There is endless yellow sand around the remains of stone carvings.
Bare, flat and lifeless, it spread to the end of the world.
(translated by Bai Fei)
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Percy bysshe shelley is a romantic poet familiar to readers in China, and is usually called Byron. He inherited the spirit of18th century enlightenment literature as the mouthpiece of the times, and was deeply influenced by godwin's liberalism and utopian socialism, becoming a "genius prophet" among poets. When he was young, he was expelled from Oxford University for publishing pamphlets promoting atheism.
The idealism permeated in Shelley's poems is obvious. He has been pursuing the ultimate beauty and goodness all his life. He believes that the kingdom of ideas is true, perfect and eternal, but this Plato's philosophy is integrated with pantheism, which is reflected in the worship of nature. In this respect, Shelley has the color of idealism; On the other hand, Shelley's expectation for the future and his utopian socialist ideal have the materialistic nature of speaking for the people. These factors constitute Shelley's poetic style.
Shelley is as rebellious as Byron, but there is no Byronic melancholy at all. Shelley, like Wordsworth, thinks that poets should be mentors and pursue the realm of "goodness" with poetry, but unlike Wordsworth, Shelley is used to "looking forward" and his poems are full of longing for a bright and beautiful future.
Ozymandias is Shelley's famous sonnet, but the romantic temperament of the author breaks through the fixed specifications of sonnets. Not only is the rhyme arrangement much freer than traditional sonnets, but six of them are "cross-line", that is, unlike classical poems, they don't add a punctuation at the end, pause in meaning, grammar and tone, but jump to the next line without stopping. This shows the liberation of romantic poetry in thought, emotion and form, giving people a refreshing feeling. Traditional sonnets have the flavor of "chamber music", but Shelley's poems have changed from slender to majestic, from symmetrical to majestic, and there is a tendency to swallow mountains and rivers without tension. Therefore, the once powerful ancient overlord Ozmandis looked so small under the poet's eyes!
Who is the "king of kings" Ozymandias? He was the overlord of the new kingdom of ancient Egypt and Pharaoh Ramses II. His reign was 1304-BC 1237, which was equivalent to the early Shang and Yin cultures in China. At that time, Egypt was a powerful military empire of slavery. It conquered Syria, Palestine, Libya and Nubia and achieved great success. In the poems handed down from ancient Egypt, there are many praises of Ramses II, comparing him to the supreme god La. However, the long period of Pharaoh's rule was also a period of prosperity and decline of the ancient Egyptian empire, and it was the last peak of the empire. The Syrian slave uprising that broke out during his reign was a signal that the empire was declining.
After Pharaoh's death, the mausoleum was built on the west side of the Nile. Many centuries later, according to the records of ancient Greek historians, there were huge Ozymandias stone statues as high as tens of meters in this area, but now they have disappeared into people's memory.
Shelley wrote this poem in 18 17, when the British upper class and court persecuted Shelley, and the reactionary holy alliance oppressed the whole of Europe like a monster. Therefore, under the pretext of overseas tourists, Shelley described the fact that Ozmandis, the king of kings, was ridiculed by history for his pride in history, and showed cold contempt for hegemonic rulers of past dynasties. The poet's contempt is more powerful than the arrogance of the overlord, because the poet is standing on the height of history and he doesn't need to argue loudly. He just needs the silent contempt of history.
From the artistic point of view, this poem is completely based on irony. Among all the sonnets, the poet generously gave Ozmandis the sonnets, which gave Ozymandias ample opportunities to express himself. In addition, the first few lines of the other poems are a brief description of the objective environment, and the poet did not come forward to make any criticism, induction or summary. It can be said that all the critical or mocking work that the poet wants to do is left to Ozymandias himself.
(flying white)