Comparing “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” by John Keats and “Ozymandias” by Perce Bysshe Shelley
Cushioned amidst the 1789 fall of the Bastille and 1815s the fall of Napoleon, the allegorical backdrop of British Romantic poetry is often besieged with relics and remnants. In Romantic poetry, the symbolism expressed and interpreted with the use of ruins is quite diverse and varied. While in on instance, ruin is a metaphor or the actual monument, it is elsewhere seen as a symbolic ruin of the poet or the narrator, and another instance can be seen as the formalistic relic of the Romantic poem, with its completely disconcerted connotation.
The poet of Romantic poetry who uses ruin as a motive can creatively reconstruct traditional and philosophical matrix that formerly established some meaning to that particular relic, which can be deemed to be some form of archeology of the romantic poetry. In addition, another contention that is held about the romantic poets and their use of ruins as motifs is that, rather than reconstruction the meaning, they tend to renovate and revamp the meaning with the help of modern ideologies. The relic poem respires life into a dead system thus enabling it to address a modern audience. Moreover, the message is interceded in diffusion and response, and is hence prone to a myriad range of aesthetic, ethnic, traditional, and philosophical forces.
A pertinent example to the above explanation would be to consider the works of John Keats and Perce Bysshe Kelley’s poems On Seeing the Elgin Marbles (1817) and Ozymandias (1818) respectively. If both these poetic masterpieces are reread over and over again, they do not appear as being mere restorations.
In the poem Ozymandias, when Shelley pulls through the relic of Ozymandias, the message that is conveyed through the informative devices of the poem is not regarding either his leadership or his supremacy but is something in relation to his brutality and the impermanence of his empire. Similarly, in Keats’s poem, the Elgin Marbles are not regarded as being a proof of eternal Grecian grandeur, but rather as cyphers that are proof of an inevitable degeneration created with the passage of time.
The restoration of the meaning that happens in the above two poems, is actually over-determined by the political insentient of a less optimistic time period, where the motive for ravenous and unquenchable authority and grandeur seems like terminal conceit. In due course, these poems are interceded through chronological, traditional, and philosophical transactions that accord a place for these two poems within a widespread domestic and global dialogue over the course that national politics takes, the arc of regal aspiration, and the anxiety created by the numerous coinciding directions, and an anxiety that is often referred to as a relic.
In the both the poems, aspects like language, pace, and spacing is remarkably elegant. The backdrop of the poems reminds about the ruins of a temple that is buried deep in the remote wildernesses of the Far East, yet we can see no such temple to emerge. However, what actually appears, is a style and sophistication that holds together both the past as well as the current in an enduring cuddle. It is this elegance that had ostensibly inspired both the poets, Shelley as well as Keats when looking at the ruins in the British Museum, which brings in a sense of respect and admiration about the hikers living in the remote regions.
While both the above chosen works completely focus on the ancient, battered oeuvres and also thematically upon the passage of time, both these works accomplish a sense of similarity in their meaning, in terms of the style in which they have been written, and also through the uniqueness of their tone.
The story of the statue of Ozymandias is narrated in a generic manner that makes it appear as being almost legendary and mythological; the traveler who is seen relating the statue to the narrator is known to be hailing from “an “antique land,” and the location of the statue is mentioned only as “in the desart,” with “lone and level sands [stretching] far away (Shelley, 1, 2, 14).” The unverifiable survival of the statue helps to dispirit the reader from connecting this Ozymandias with any other statue of location, eventually laying an increased prominence on its symbolism.
On the other hand, Keats’ poem, ponders on a well-sheltered wonder present in the British Museum. Despite of its title, ‘On Seeing the Elgin Marbles’ does not designate the Elgin Marbles visually, but rather emphases on the observations that they encourage within the speaker. While the poem of Keats reflects upon identical themes, but is predominantly more about an individual’s reaction to the relics and the resultant inner conflicts, rather than portraying them and allocating them ethical or metaphysical restraint (Keats), Shelley’s Ozymandias looks more like a parable with the numerous images that are very strong and with a narrator who is seen highly uninvolved with the action within the poem.
Works Cited
Keats, John. "On Seeing the Elgin Marbles." Wolfson, Susan J. The Cambridge Companion to Keats. Cambridge: Princeton University, 2001. 180. Web. 10 March 2016. <https://books.google.co.in/books?id=0cCsrQXxNSEC&pg=PA174&dq=On+Seeing+the+Elgin+Marbles&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=On%20Seeing%20the%20Elgin%20Marbles&f=false>.
Keats, John. "On Seeing the Elgin Marbles." Keats, John. The Longman Anthology of British Literature. United States: Addison-Wesley Educational Inc., 2003. 863.
Shelley, Perce Bysshe. Ozyandias. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015.
