Poetry, Year 11: Ozymandias, London and The Prelude (Power and Conflict option)

sonnet

提示Count the lines: there are fourteen.

为什么It does not keep to either of the standard sonnet rhyme schemes. One reading is that the broken pattern suits a poem about a broken statue.

kings

提示He claims to rule over all other rulers.

为什么The boast survives; the kingdom does not. The statue's inscription is the only place where the king still speaks.

Mighty; despair

提示He addresses other powerful people and tells them how they should feel.

为什么He meant: despair of ever matching me. Now that nothing is left, the line means something else: despair, because this is what becomes of all power. The irony is the heart of the poem.

remains

提示A verb meaning is left; as a noun it can mean ruins or a dead body.

为什么The flat three-word sentence answers the grand inscription. The poem then ends on “The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Egypt

提示The statue stands in a desert in North Africa.

为什么He is Ramesses II. Shelley began the poem in 1817, when part of a huge statue of that pharaoh was expected in Britain, and published it in 1818.

A traveller “from an antique land”

提示Someone the speaker met.

为什么The king's power reaches us third-hand: through the sculptor, then the traveller, then the speaker. Each step makes Ozymandias smaller and further away.

manacles

提示Metal cuffs that fasten a prisoner's wrists.

为什么They are made in the mind: people are held down by ways of thinking as well as by laws. Blake's own spelling is mind-forg'd; some editions modernise it.

That everything in the city, even the river, is owned and controlled

提示A charter was a legal document granting rights or ownership.

为什么A river should be free. In this city nature itself has been mapped and licensed by those with power.

weakness; woe

提示Two w words: one for lack of strength, one for deep sorrow.

为什么The word “mark” comes three times in two lines, and the repetition makes the suffering feel stamped on everyone. In the anthology's text the first of the three is a verb, meaning to notice.

The Church and the monarchy

提示One stands for religion, the other for the state.

为什么The cry “Every blackening church appals” and the sigh “Runs in blood down palace-walls”. Blake holds those in power answerable for the suffering in the streets.

It joins a wedding to a funeral: a beginning to a death

提示A hearse carries a coffin.

为什么Putting two opposed ideas side by side like this is an oxymoron. Blake suggests that the city's misery poisons even love and new life.

1794

提示Five years after the French Revolution began.

为什么The Songs of Experience answer his earlier Songs of Innocence. London is one of its angriest poems, written when revolution abroad had made the British government nervous of dissent.

He takes a small boat that is not his and rows out on the lake

提示He finds it tied to a willow tree.

为什么He calls it “an act of stealth / And troubled pleasure”: he knows he is doing wrong, and enjoys it uneasily.

Nature

提示Wordsworth treats it as a guide and teacher throughout the poem.

为什么Nature is personified as a female presence who leads the boy to the experience and then teaches him a lesson through it.

huge

提示The poet reaches for an adjective and can only find one he has just used.

为什么Repeating the plain word suggests that the boy has run out of language for what he sees. The peak seems to grow and to come after him “like a living thing”.

“With trembling oars”: frightened and shaken

提示His confidence has gone.

为什么The extract turns at the moment the peak appears. Before it the boy is proud of his skill; after it he steals back to the mooring place.

solitude

提示The state of being alone.

为什么For many days his mind is filled with “huge and mighty forms, that do not live / Like living men”. Nature has shown him a power far beyond his own.

Blank verse

提示Unrhymed lines of ten syllables.

为什么The Prelude is a very long poem about the growth of the poet's own mind. The unbroken, flowing verse suits a memory told in one breath.