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Compare Shakespeare's "Sonnet 18" with Shelley's "Ozymandias."
Quick answer:
Both "Sonnet 18" and "Ozymandias" explore themes of immortality through art but arrive at different conclusions. Shakespeare's sonnet claims that poetry immortalizes the beloved's beauty, while Shelley's poem depicts the impermanence of power, with Ozymandias's ruined statue highlighting the transient nature of his legacy. Both agree that art endures longer than temporal achievements.
What an interesting question! These poems certainly both share a common theme and preoccupation: that of immortality and how far it can be ensured through art. However, they approach this theme from different angles, and ultimately draw different conclusions.
Both poems share the same form—they are sonnets, comprising fourteen lines, although they are not quite the same type of sonnet. Sonnet 18 is in Shakespeare's own peculiar form, now called a Shakespearean sonnet, whereas "Ozymandias" blends the Shakespearean sonnet form with the Petrarchan, the rhyme scheme shifting between the two as the sonnet progresses.
In Sonnet 18, the poet emphasizes the fact that his beloved, unlike the ephemeral "summer" and the "buds of May," will never "decline" from his height of fairness. On the contrary, he will enjoy an unfaded, "eternal summer," for one simple reason: the "eternal lines" set down by the poet will ensure that the beloved is...
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remembered. For as long as this piece of art endures, it will "give life" to the beloved and keep his memory alive. There is a strangeirony in the fact that, by reading this sonnet still today, we prove Shakespeare's thesis true; but, at the same time, we do not know the beloved's name. We remember him and his beauty, but not who he was.
In "Ozymandias," we certainly do know who the immortalized being is. We know his name and that he was "King of Kings." Through the art he had commissioned, we remember the "visage" of this person and also something of his personality. However, Shelley takes a different attitude to Shakespeare. Perhaps because Ozymandias has created this statue himself, rather than it being art born of love, there is a suggestion that it does not do what he wanted it to—we remember Ozymandias, perhaps, but not in the way he intended. His "works" no longer exist—his pride in them is unfounded. This statue, "sunken" and half-destroyed, is all that remains of Ozymandias; so, he is immortal but not in perhaps the way he would have wished.