Ozymandias by P. B. Shelley, read in a Regency era pronunciation
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 ก.ย. 2024
- I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said-“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert... Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. With the Raven, this poem really is one of the many pinnacles of English Poetry.
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said-“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert... Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
O yes!
Well done.
"The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed" - what does that mean. Whose hand mocked whom? Whose heart fed what?
Thank you!
My interpretation would be, "The hand that mocked them" is the hand of the sculptor, mocking the passions of the tyrant, because he is preserving them in stone for future generations to see: the "frown," "wrinkled lip," and "sneer of cold command." "The heart that fed" belongs to the tyrant, but exactly what the phrase means is a little ambiguous, because of the grammar. My favourite interpretation is that his heart is feeding on the service done by the sculptor, being puffed up by it as he thinks of his greatness being immortalized in colossal form; thus you have a contrast between the sculptor mocking Ozymandias by sculpting him, and Ozymandias feeding, unwittingly, on that mockery. "The hand that mocked his passions, and the heart that fed [while the hand mocked them]." But the phrase might bear multiple interpretations; another one would be that the heart of Ozymandias is feeding on his own passions. "The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed [on them]."
Thank you for your time, these interpretations make a lot of sense. Both Ozzy and the Sculptor fell into the boundless wasteland of sand.
Merci ,such a beautiful moment
Great reading!
In my humble opinion, there should be no pause after 'stamped on these lifeless things'.
The whole idea is that the passions (i.e. the emotions and traits depicted by the sculptor in the image of Ozymandias) have survived (outlasted) the hand that mocked them (the sculptor who engraved these passions in stone) and the heart that fed (the heart that fed/gave rise to those emotions, or in other words, Ozymandias himself). The punctuation calls for a pause only after 'the heart that fed' as indicated by the semi-colon.
In addition, it should be "no thing beside remains", not "nothing beside remains", as can be seen in the original text as it was printed in 1818. This preserves the rhythm.
Thank you for your kind words. I place a pause after "stamped on these lifeless things" partly because of the line-break and the comma, and partly in order to lay emphasis on the line following as a personal choice. The following passage on the great Shakespearean actor David Garrick indicates that rhetorical or non-grammatical pauses were employed by good readers at a period close to that of Shelley:
"And how did Garrick speak the soliloquy last night?-Oh, against all rule, my lord, most ungrammatically! betwixt the substantive and the adjective, which should agree together in number, case, and gender, he made a breach thus,-stopping, as if the point wanted settling;-and betwixt the nominative case, which your lordship knows should govern the verb, he suspended his voice in the epilogue a dozen times three seconds and three fifths by a stop watch, my lord, each time.-Admirable grammarian! But in suspending his voice, was the sense suspended likewise? Did no expression of attitude or countenance fill up the chasm? Was the eye silent? Did you narrowly look?-I look'd only at the stop-watch, my lord.-Excellent observer!"
(From Sterne's Tristram Shandy.)
No thing is spelled "Nothing" in "Rosalind and Helen, a modern eclogue; with other poems: by Percy Bysshe Shelley" in 1819, and is my own preferred reading.
@@ThomasWhichello Thank you. I do appreciate your response. I find that John Gielgud is the only one who reads the "...stamped on these lifeless things, the hand that mocked them..." the way I imagine it should be read.