Ozymandias of Egypt.
This sonnet is by an English romantic poet called Percy Bysshe Shelly. He was born in 1792, he was the heir of a rich estate acquired by his grandfather, He was born in Field place, near Horsham in Sussex, into an aristocratic family. In 1810 he entered Oxford University.
His first marriage was to Harriet Westbrooke however she killed herself. His second marriage was to MaryWollstonecraft Godwin who later wrote the famous Frankenstein.
Bysshe Shelly later tragically drowned to death in 1822.
Ozymandias of Egypt is one of Percy Bysshe Shelly's most famous pieces of work. It starts of in a kind of story telling, with an enjambment in the first line.
"I met a traveller from an antique land "Who said: two vast and trunkless legs of stone "Stand in the desert.
The poem has the rhyme scheme, ABABACDCEDEFEF.
Shelley's grave in Rome
Percy Bysshe Shelley, by Alfred Clint (died 1883)....
Shelley Memorial, University College, Oxford, Engl...This poem is not like the Shakespearean sonnets, it has not got a rhyming couplet at the end; it is more similar to a Petrarchan sonnet.
The general metre in this poem is ten, however in the tenth line the metre is eleven this is a device the poet has used as he wishes the reader to spend more time on that line than they have on all of the rest of them.
The poem is about an old statue of one of the rulers of Egypt, some sources say that the poem is actually about Ramasiss III. However all that remains of this statue is two legs, "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert." Also in the sand there is a stone face, which belonged to the statue. We can tell by the terminology used that this man was not a very nice man and he didn't...