Central Paradox in the Poem Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Paradox in Ozymandias
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Paradox in Ozymandias
As opposed to a referential language that cannot accurately represent the particular message, paradox conveys the poet’s shifting meanings. Cleanth Brooks stresses the importance of paradox in comprehending and interpreting poetry by terming it as “the language appropriate and inevitable to poetry.” The paradox is a literary device entailing the inconsistent comparation of incongruous ideas to explain or reconcile their presence. The poem Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley uses the literary device to illustrate human power's fragility and transient nature. It tells the story of an ancient Egyptian king whose accomplishments and fame are dissolved by the sand of time. The paradox is essential to communicating the symbol of a powerful and oppressive king’s dominion and how it now lays waste in the desert due to time: power is unquestionably meaningful and meaningless due to its transient quality. The central paradox in the poem is the awe-inspiring nature of power and yet unable to withstand the reductive effect of time.
Shelley talks about meeting a traveler from an exotic country encountering the surviving fragments of a massive statue whose inscribed pedestal underscored the grandeur of an ancient and peerless king. The paradox in the boastful assertion is the pitiful state in which the “king of kings” lies: two vast and trunkless legs remain of the original colossal statue while the half sunk, shattered visage and the remaining wreckage lie decaying and desolate on the boundless and bare desert. The poem appears to champion the merciless and enduring power of time over human power while also demonstrating the resistance of art to the sands of time. While those mighty achievements that inspired Ozymandias’ statute are nowhere to be seen, and even what survives of his sculpture are contemptible, the inscription remains. The sands of time might have erased any remnants of the great kingdom the statute was supposed to overlook, but the “wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command” are still evident, and so is the vain inscription.
Paradox contributes to the poem’s overall meaning by illustrating the ephemeral nature of power and showing how art is always in a constant evolutionary state, unlike grandeur that passes away with time. The inscription on the statute, just like the poem itself, is an enduring artifact that gradually accumulates meaning over time. Only over time does artfully assemble meaning: the inscription...