Ozymandias

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Task: from the title to line 8

- Considering the title.

In the first place, by considering the title the reader cannot understand immediately what the poem is about. Ozymandias is a very uncommon word and it may not be surely related with a person or a place, since it is a foreign word. An intelligent reader may infer that it comes from more ancient times, thanks to the presence of the letters ‘z' and ‘y' close to each other and the ending syllabus ‘-as'. In conclusion, Ozymandias may be the name of a person/place expressed in an antique language as classical Greek.

- Denotative analysis (until line 8).

After a careful reading of the text, we manage to understand that the narrator (or maybe the poet himself) is a traveller, who accidentally met an other traveller ‘from an antique land'. The traveller tells his story along the whole length of the sonnet.

Without any introduction, the speaking voice begins telling his story: he saw two huge and ‘trunkless legs of stone' while he was on a journey in the desert, and not too far away he also saw a ‘shattered visage' half covered by the sand. Then he notes some features of that face: the ‘wrinkled lip' and, above all, the ‘sneer of cold command' makes him think to how skilled and expert was the sculptor that made it; indeed he managed to express very well how that person used to behave, moreover he gifted it with the eternity. The traveller adds an observation, that is the sculptor made survive these ‘passions' in the lifeless legs and face of a destroyed statue, but also he overstated them in order to do a parody of those behaves and of that overbearing  person.