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“OZYMANDIAS”

BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

Besides personal,spatial and time deixis,there is relational deixis which refers to

the relationship between participants.Can you make any assumption about how relational deixisworks in Shelley's text?”“

Ozymandias"is a famous sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley, published in 1818. It isfrequently anthologised and is probably Shelley's most famous short poem.It deals with a

number of great themes, such as the arrogance and transience of power, the permanence of real

art and emotional truth, and the relationship between artist and subject. It explores these themes

with some striking imagery, amplified by a setting–Egypt and the Sahara desert–that was exoticfor European audiences in the early 19th century. The poem's sense of distance is further 

enhanced by its second-hand narration; the commentator is relating to us the words of an

unnamed "traveller from an antique land".This traveler told him a story about the ruins of astatue in the desert of his native country.The traveler added that the “sneer of cold command”

on the statue's face indicate that the sculptor understood well the emotions of the statue's

subject.The memories of those emotions survives even if both the sculptor and his subject aredead now.On the pedestal of the statue appear the words,”My name is Ozymandias,king of 

kings:/Look on my works,Ye Mighty and despair!”But around the decaying ruin of the

statue,nothing remains,only the “lone and level sands”,which stretch out around it.“Ozymandias is a sonnet ,a fourteen-line poem metered in iambic pentameter 

.The rhyme theme is somewhat unusual for a sonnet of this era;it doesn't fit a conventional

Petrarchan pattern,but instead interlinks the octave with the sestet,in formABABACDCEDEFEF.

By using the sonnet form ,Shelley is drawing attention to the formal, artificial, or constructed

nature of his work--just as a monument is a formal, artificial, constructed thing. But unlike themonument, the work of literature is not subject to time and decay. In addition, what remains

most prominent of Ozymandias's statute is the inscription on the pedestal--in other words, the

words remain more clearly than his fearsome monument. One might also notice how those last6 lines, the lines where we get the inscription are kind of like a pedestal for the first 8 lines of 

the poem. Look at how the first 8 lines are stacked on top of the last 6, like a statue on a pedestal.

Finally, think about what Shelley is saying about the relative impermanence of the

 physical world and the things we think are important in it. Do literature and art allow us to

transcend the everyday, physical world?

In the first line of the poem,the deictic centre that says “I” shifts to another deictic centre”the

traveler”and the impression that brings into the light is that of a rotating camera which captures

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not only the static images but also the fugitive ones.The poet throws us in the immemorial times

while he's describing through the words of the traveller the statue's face.

According to Stockwell,we can follow the three different persons,two different

 places(the implicit “here”and “the antique land”)and the present tense of “met” and said”;thetime in which the traveller was in the desert,chronologically in the past but deictically projected

as a present tense “stand” and these words appear” and a deictic projection to the ancient time

of the inscription of when”is”,”look” and “despair” were written while Ozymandias was alive.There is a relational aspect to the participants within the text,in terms of how they are

socially related to each other,and how each perceptual deictic centre seems to regard the other 

 participants.

When we consider the relational deixis of Shelley's poem “Ozymandias”,we refer to theexpressions that encode the social viewpoint and relative situations of 

authors,narrators,characters and readers,including modality and expressions of point of view

and focalisation;naming and address conventions;evaluative word-choices.For example,thenarrating author of Henry Fielding's”Tom Jones” is very polite to the reader in direct

address,and adopts different stylistic tones of “voice” in relation to the different characters in his

novel or the narrating author of Laurence Sterne in his metafictional “Tristram Shandy”which isalso an avant -la -lettre novel for his era, tackles different situations of his characters by

marking them.Laurence Sterne is also very condescendent with his readers and many times

finds himself,the narrating author divagating on such matters that apparently have nothing to dowith the line of the narration.

All the persons in the poem are related even though they are spatially and temporallyseparated .Shelley masterfully created a virtual world in which neither time nor space is

important but only art creation.

We can easily identify with the persons in the poem because they are or were people like uswith their emotions,desires and fears.Therefore,no matter how important your status is or 

influent person can be,we are tributary to your era.“Ozymandias” might be the same situation of 

a man who was very powerful in his time but paid the same price like all of us,falling into

oblivion.His statue only could remind to those who look at the greatness of the king and hiscivilization but all has been turned to dust by the impersonal,indiscriminate,destructive power 

of history.The ruined statue is now merely a monument to one man's hubris,and a powerful

statement about the insignificance of human beings to the passage of time.Ozymandias is also ametaphor for the ephemeral nature of political power but it also can be a metaphor for the pride

and hubris of all of humanity,in any of its manifestations.It is significant that all that remains of 

Ozymandias is a work of art and a group of words;as Shakespeare does in his sonnets,Shelleydemonstrates that art and language long outlast the other legacies of power.

Framing the sonnet as a story told to the speaker by traveller from an antique land”enablesShelley to add another level of obscurity to Ozymandias's position with regard to the reader-

rather than seeing the statue with our own eyes,so to speak,we hear about it from someone who

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heard about it from someone who has seen it.Thus the ancient king is rendered even less

commanding;the distancing of the narrative serves to undermine his power over us as

completely as has the passage of time.

Shelley's description of the statue works to reconstruct,graduallly,the figure of the “king of 

kings”:first see merely the “shattered visage”,then the face itself”,with its “frown”/And

wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command”;then we are introduced to the figure of thesculptor,and are able to imagine the living man sculpting the living king;then we are introduced

to the king's people in the line,”the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed”.The kingdom

is now imaginatively complete,and we are introduced to the extraordinary,prideful boast of theking:”Look on my words,ye Mighty,and despair!”With that,the poet demolishes our imaginary

  picture of the king,and interposes centuries of ruin between it and us:”Nothing besides

remains.Round the decay/Of that colossal wreck,boundless and bare,/The lone and level sandsstretch far away”.

The poem might be addressed to Shelley's contemporaries who thought that political

manoeuvres could excuse their intentions or to nineteenth century's reader who experienced

another stage in history,a period of turbulations and war or to all readers of all times to consider the most important thing of their ephemeral existance and that would be spiritual salvation

through art creation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• http://britlitwiki.wikispaces.com/Ozymandias

• Stockwell,Peter-”Cognitive-An Introduction”,2002:45-48

• http://www.sparknotes.com/

• http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ozymandias_(Shelley)

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“Tess of the D'Urbervilles”

by Thomas Hardy

“The narrative gives Tess's perspective of things most often.Can you find examples of sentences which clearly show in whose interest-focus they are formulated?Can you identify a

“voice” in the narrative which differs from that of the narrator's?”

Tess-of-the-d'Urbervilles:A Pure Woman” exhibits the characteristics of literarynaturalism,an extreme form of realism that developed in France in the 19th century.It was

inspired in part by the scientific determinism of Charles Darwin.Four Frenchmen;Hippolyte

Taine,Edmond and Jules Goncourt and Emile Zola-applied the principles of scientific andeconomic determinism to literature to create literary naturalism.Thomas Hardy was one of the

naturalist writers who adopted these principles to his novels.He created his characters as if they

were animals in the wild without chance or free will and then he” reported” their activity.

He included in his novel details when depicting a particular scene because he wanted the scene

to be as “natural” as possible.Naturalist writers generally achieve limited success in writing an

objective and detached novel because they analyze the characters they created who may be based on real people,but they themselves are not real.Therefore,naturalist writer brings a part of 

himself-a subjective part.We can identify in the excerpt the sentences describing the climate

after Tess revealed to her new husband the relationship with Alec D'Urbervilles:”The fire inthe grate looked impish-demoniacally funny,...The fender grinned idly,as if it too did not

care.All the material objects around announced their irresponsability with terrible iteration.”All

the objects around her are screaming about her sin.The narrator did not choose thewords”demoniacally”,”fire” or “water “accidentally but he might have thought that a man -the

symbol of fire and a woman- the symbol of water committed a sin and they must be punished.

The climax of the novel takes place on the wedding night of Tess and Angel after Tess reveals to

her husband the details of her relationship with Alec D'urbervilles.The key moment occurswhen Angel rejects Tess,saying that she is not the woman he believed her to be.His inability to

accept Tess as she is precipitates the tragic events that follow.

The most dominant perpespective in Tess is clearly Tess's own appreciation of her 

circumstances.The narrator stands very close to her,though at no point does he identify with

her.In some subtle way,the reader is aware the narrator is man and that they are reading amasculine perspective of a woman.

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This is not to say he is not totally sensitive to Tess's femininity,nor is he in any way

chauvinistic.But there is always a gender gap.At times,the narrator enters into Tess's

thoughts,but more typically he is concerned with her emotions and responses,and how they arevisibly expressed.Hardy frequently uses his narrator as a mouthpiece for his own opinions,as wecan identify in the sentence”And yet nothing had changed since the moment he had been

kissing her;or,rather nothing in the substance of things.But the essence of things had changed”.

In the 19th century,men dominated society and expected women to do their bidding.Tess's

resistance to the advances of Alec succeed for a time,but he eventually entraps her after 

continually harassing her.Although Angel loves Tess and marries her,he abandons her shortlyafter their wedding when he discovers what happened between her and Alec.It does not matter 

to him that he himself had an affair before he was married.Men may stray with impunity,he

 believes.Women may not.

One of Hardy's main theses in Tess is that heredity,environment,and pure chance shape the lives

of people.They have little or no free will .Ironically,however,Hardy rebukes Victorian society

for its moral and social attitudes.In other words,Hardy is condemning society for actions over which (he theorizes)it has no control.

It seems likely that Hardy tries through her words or actions to draw attention to the status of woman in the society.Tess is begging for forgiveness and slides down beside Angel's foot in an

attempt of making him aware of her true love.She is obedient and tries to respect the principles

of her society and believes that love would set her free from prejudice./”Ihave been

hoping,longing,praying to make you happy!I have thought what joy it will be to do it,what an

unworthy wife I shall be if I do not!”She is aware of the consequences of her deeds as thesociety would disapprove them,at the level of the macrocosm but she is also confident that

Angel would understand it and react properly .His concise,sharp sentences intensify the tumultof her thoughts.Tess is desperatly looking for an argumentation that could make Angel revisit

his feelings for her./”...I love you forever in allchanges,in all disgraces,because you are

yourself.I ask no more.Then how can you,O my own husband,stop loving me?”/

His attitude towards her shifts from uncertainty to indignation and finally, he feels disgusted

with her lamentation.He is looking down on her as though she were “a species of impostor; a

guilty woman in the guise of an innocent one”.Angel reaches his verdict as the society would dothat Tess is responsible for her actions and there is nothing more than he could do.She is “ill”

now after the disclosure and it is natural to feel that way.”A Pure Woman” like Tess can not

 purify her soul through love without paying its price.

Hardy witnesses the injustice of social law and the ill effect of male-dominance over women

and dramatizes them in the novel through the miserable life of Tess who is crushed by the

comprehensive vicious power of society. In the perspective of the conventional world, Tess is anunforgivable sinner whose “terrible sins” are doomed; however, Hardy, cherishing “a thousand

 pities” for Tess, calls her apure woman. This is the irony against the hypocritical conventions of 

the Victorian Age, which restricted man’s nature to such a large extent as it oppressed people,

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especially women, who were trodden at the bottom of society.Tess is driven to offend the social

law, but she responds to the natural law, to her nature. Her sexual involvement is normal in

natural law, but she has to face the prejudice of severe social codes and respond with rebellion.Tess is naturally pure if she is socially “degraded”. Perry Meisel indicates that “Theconfrontation within man of his natural and social components, a confrontation that is tragic

when recognized selfcons c ious ly, is the psychological bat t leground of Hardy’s last ,

and probably greatest, novels.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

•

http://www.crossref-it.info/textguide/Tess-of-the-d'Urbervilles/11/1222

•  http://www.cummingsstudyguides.net/Guides4/Tess.html 

• http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/acd/cg/lt/rb/600/600PDF/chen.PDF

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“DUNAREA DE JOS”UNIVERSITY OF LETTERS

FACULTY OF LETTERS

ROMANIAN -ENGLISH

2ND YEAR,DISTANCE LEARNING

“OZYMANDIAS”BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

“TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES “BY THOMAS HARDY

STUDENT,

BREABAN N.GABRIELA