Analysis

Ozymendious
P.B Shelly

Imagine this scenario: three English men sitting around a table at a drunken party. The men bet each other that each of them could come up with the best poem in the alotted time of fifteen minutes. The poem's topic was Egypt. The poem Ozymandias was the response of Percy Bysshe Shelley to the bet.

The first vital point to note is that the poem is an Italian sonnet in a traditional 14 line, 8-6, set-up with iambic pentameter. It encapsulates a great story about Ramses, the past king of Egypt.

The poem was written around 1800 and the fact that it was written in an "antique land" (1) illustrates that the author was attempting to distance himself from Ramses, indicating the faded view of the past king Ozymandias.

Great opposition, irony and sarcasm appears when it is said, "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains." This negative connotation shows that there once was a vast kingdom, but now that kingdom has disappeared. Neither property nor the king himself is immortal, the sonnet indicates.

When it is said that the "lone and level sands stretch far away" (13-14), the reader realizes that perhaps the sand is more vast now than the empire is.

Finally, when breaking down the word "Ozymandas" in the original greek, we realize that the kingdom no longer exists. Ozy comes from the Greek "ozium," which means to breath, or air. Mandias comes from the Greek "mandate," which means to rule.

Hence, Ozymandias is simply a "ruler of air" or a "ruler of nothing". It is then obvious that the King of Kings spoken of in the poem is actually nature itself. Nature never disappears and nature represents the immortality not represented by the Ramses or any other individual or possession.

Ode to a nightingale

Keats

(1st two stanzas)

This ode was inspired after Keats heard the song of a nightingale while staying with a friend in the country. This poem was also written after the death of his brother and the many references to death in this poem are a reflection of this. Among the thematic concerns in this poem is the wish to escape life through different routes. Although the poem begins by describing the song of an actual nightingale, the nightingale goes on to become a symbol of the immortality of nature.

In lines 1-3 Keats expresses a wish to dull and numb his senses artificially. He wishes to use "hemlock" or "some dull opiate" to numb his pain. He also makes a reference to Lethe, the river that those who are about to be reincarnated must drink from to forget their old lives when he says in line 4 that he has to "Lethe-wards…sunk". However it is not out of envy of the joy in the bird's song but because he is too happy that he wishes to numb his senses. In line 7 Keats refers to the nightingale as a "Dryad of the trees", a tree spirit, the bird has become a symbol.

In stanza two, Keats call "for a draught of vintage" that tastes of "Flora and country-green". In line 14 the wine tastes of "Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth". "Provencal" was a language used by medieval troubadours. Here Keats does not want to be drunk but rather he wants the wine to get into a state of happiness and merriment. He also wishes the wine to inspire him when he alludes to the "Hippocrene" in line 16, a fountain sacred to the muses said to bring poetic inspiration to those who drank from it.

The idea that wine will give him ideas is illustrated in line 17 with "beaded bubbles winking at the brim". Besides describing the Hippocrene, the bubbles are Keats' thoughts about to overflow. Drink is also a way for him to escape as he wishes to "fade away into the forest dim". The word "Fade" is repeated at the beginning of the first...

In mythology, to drink the waters of the Lethe (the river of Hades) is to forget the sadness of life, yet to reach the Lethe one must first die. Thus, death is oblivion and vice-versa. In the third stanza, the speaker focuses on the forgetfulness of death. He wishes to enter the “immortal” world of the nightingale, to “leave the world unseen” and to “dissolve, and quite forget” the sufferings of a human world overshadowed by the knowledge of death. That world, characterized by “weariness” and “fret,” is one ravaged by the consequences of human foresight, “where but to think is to be full of sorrow.” Because consciousness brings on “leadeneyed despairs,” youth lives under the gloom of death and beauty becomes tainted by the knowledge that it is passing. Thus, under the normal conditions of man’s existence, both beauty and the response to beauty are undermined by the limiting nature of time and death. In contrast, the nightingale does not need to “forget” or to be numbed by wine. On the contrary, it “hast never known” the fear of time and death because it does not “think.” It therefore can enjoy a “happy lot” and sing “of summer in full-throated ease.”

Stanza I

Line 2, hemlock: a poison made from an herb or a poisonous drink made from that herb.
Line 4, Lethe: a river in Hades (the underworld). Souls about to be reincarnated drank from it to forget their past lives.
Line 7, Dryad: a wood nymph or nymph of the trees. Dryads or nymphs were female personifications of natural features, like mountains and rivers; they were young, beautiful, long-lived and liked music and dance. A Dryad was connected to a specific tree and died when the tree died. s

Stanza II

Line 3, Flora: goddess of flowers and fertility.
Line 4. Provencal: of Provence, an area in the south of France associated with song, pleasure, and luxury.
Line 6, Hippocrene: a spring sacred to the Muses, located on Mt.Helicon. Drinking its waters inspired poets. (The nine muses were associated with different arts, such as epic poetry, sacred song, and dancing

Tyger

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In the first verse, the author compares the fierceness of a tiger to a burning presence in dark forests. He wonders what immortal power could create such a fearful beast.
- In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand dare sieze the fire? Here the author compares the burning eyes of the tiger to some transplanted distant fire that only someone with wings could reach and only with impermeable hands could seize. The author wonders where such a powerful fire could have come from? Hell, possibly?
- And what shoulder, & what art. Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand? & what dread feet?
In this verse we have a metaphor giving us a vision a skillful and powerful blacksmith creating the tiger's beating heart awakening a powerful beast. The phrase "...twist the sinews of thy heart" is also an allusion to a hardheartedness that a beast of prey must have towards the creatures it kills.
- What the hammer? what the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp Dare its deadly terrors clasp? This verse continues the allusion to a creator, who, having made the fearsome best, must confront with the sheer terror of a tiger's nature. Did the tiger's creator have to retrieve the tiger's fearsome brain from an evil, hot place?
- When the stars threw down their spears, And watered heaven with their tears, Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Here the author, with beautiful rhetoric, describes a marvelous creation process likening starlight to a symbolic destructive process. The author wonders whether the creator of the fierce and predatory tiger could also make the docile, gentle lamb. He sees a conflict between the creation of heartless, burning predator and its potential victim, the lamb.
- Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
The final verse is but a reprise, almost a chorus. It serves the purpose of repeating the wondrous question of the tiger's creation and gives the reader another chance to enjoy the rhetorical, and already answered question, "What immortal hand or eye?"
The answer lies in the reader's interpretation of creation: Did God create the fearsome along with the gentle? Why does He allow the tiger to burn in the dark forest, while the lamb gambols in the glen under the stars of that very creation? The author leaves it up to the reader to decide. The important thing is the question, not the answer.

Analysis

PB Shelley - To a Skylark
Summary The speaker, addressing a skylark, says that it is a "blithe (carefree, happy) Spirit" rather than a bird, for its song comes from Heaven, and from its full heart pours "profuse (abundant) strains of unpremeditated (unplanned, natural) art." The skylark flies higher and higher, "like a cloud of fire" in the blue sky, singing as it flies. In the "golden lightning" of the sun, it floats and runs, like "an unbodied joy." As the skylark flies higher and higher, the speaker loses sight of it, but is still able to hear its "shrill delight," which comes down as keenly as moonbeams in the "white dawn," which can be felt even when they are not seen. The earth and air ring with the skylark's voice, just as Heaven overflows with moonbeams when the moon shines out from behind "a lonely cloud."
The speaker says that no one knows what the skylark is, for it is unique: even "rainbow clouds" do not rain as brightly as the shower of melody that pours from the skylark. The bird is "like a poet hidden / In the light of thought," able to make the world experience "sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not." It is like a lonely maiden in a palace tower, who uses her song to soothe her lovelorn soul. It is like a golden glow-worm (an insect), scattering light among the flowers and grass in which it is hidden. It is like a rose embowered in its own green leaves, whose scent is blown by the wind until the bees are faint with "too much sweet." The skylark's song surpasses (defeats) "all that ever was, / Joyous and clear and fresh," whether it is the rain falling on the "twinkling grass" or the flowers the rain awakens.
Calling the skylark "Sprite (fairy/angel/heavenly spirit) or Bird," the speaker asks it to tell him its "sweet thoughts," for he has never heard anyone or anything call up "a flood of rapture (delight, joy) so divine." Compared to the skylark's, any music would seem lacking. What objects, the speaker asks, are "the fountains of thy happy strain?" Is it fields, waves, mountains, the sky, the plain, or "love of thine own kind" or "ignorance or pain"? Pain and languor (laziness, slowness), the speaker says, "never came near" the skylark: it loves, but has never known "love's sad satiety." Of death, the skylark must know "things more true and deep" than mortals could dream; otherwise, the speaker asks, "how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?"
For mortals, the experience of happiness is bound inextricably with the experience of sadness: dwelling upon memories and hopes for the future, mortal men "pine for what is not"; their laughter is "fraught (burdened, filled)" with "some pain"; their "sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought." But, the speaker says, even if men could "scorn (disrespect)/ Hate and pride and fear," and were born without the capacity to weep, he still does not know how they could ever approximate the joy expressed by the skylark. Calling the bird a "scorner of the ground," he says that its music is better than all music and all poetry. He asks the bird to teach him "half the gladness / That thy brain must know," for then he would overflow with "harmonious madness," and his song would be so beautiful that the world would listen to him, even as he is now listening to the skylark.
Form The eccentric; songlike, five-line stanzas of "To a Skylark"--all twenty-one of them--follow the same pattern: the first four lines are metered in trochaic trimeter, the fifth in iambic hexameter (a line which can also be called an Alexandrine). The rhyme scheme of each stanza is extremely simple: ABABB.
Commentary If the West Wind was Shelley's first convincing attempt to articulate an aesthetic philosophy through metaphors of nature, the skylark is his greatest natural metaphor for pure poetic expression, the "harmonious madness" of pure inspiration. The skylark's song issues from a state of purified existence, a Wordsworthian notion of complete unity with Heaven through nature; its song is motivated by the joy of that uncomplicated purity of being, and is unmixed with any hint of melancholy or of the bittersweet, as human joy so often is. The skylark's unimpeded song rains down upon the world, surpassing every other beauty, inspiring metaphor and making the speaker believe that the bird is not a mortal bird at all, but a "Spirit," a "sprite," a "poet hidden / In the light of thought."
In that sense, the skylark is almost an exact twin of the bird in Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale"; both represent pure expression through their songs, and like the skylark, the nightingale "wast not born for death." But while the nightingale is a bird of darkness, invisible in the shadowy forest glades, the skylark is a bird of daylight, invisible in the deep bright blue of the sky. The nightingale inspires Keats to feel "a drowsy numbness" of happiness that is also like pain, and that makes him think of death; the skylark inspires Shelley to feel a frantic, rapturous joy that has no part of pain. To Keats, human joy and sadness are inextricably linked, as he explains at length in the final stanza of the "Ode on Melancholy." But the skylark sings free of all human error and complexity, and while listening to his song, the poet feels free of those things, too.
Structurally and linguistically, this poem is almost unique among Shelley's works; its strange form of stanza, with four compact lines and one very long line, and its lilting, songlike diction ("profuse strains of unpremeditated art") work to create the effect of spontaneous poetic expression flowing musically and naturally from the poet's mind. Structurally, each stanza tends to make a single, quick point about the skylark, or to look at it in a sudden, brief new light; still, the poem does flow, and gradually advances the mini-narrative of the speaker watching the skylark flying higher and higher into the sky, and envying its untrammeled inspiration--which, if he were to capture it in words, would cause the world to listen.

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