A Brief History of the Sonnet - Chapter 10 (Under the spell of Shelley)

 Each Romantic is underestimated after Eliot's strictures but worth reading, amazing writers who make us return to them again and again if we like reading English poetry. One of those really not recognized as much as he should be is Percy Bysshe Shelley, partly due to Arnold's calling him "an ineffectual angel beating his luminous wings in the void". As for me Shelley never ceases to enthrall me, whether with his Ode to the West Wind or his poem on Manchester or his play the Cenci, which is in the classic Shakespearean mould, but of course, he is world-famous for his sonnet against tyranny.

Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias"

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.

"Shelley's "Ozymandias" is a sonnet, written in iambic pentameter, but with an atypical rhyme scheme (ABABA CDCEDEFEF) when compared to other English-language sonnets, and without the characteristic octave-and-sestet structure." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias)

 It is comforting to think that this will be the end of Donald Trump 

too and today's tyrants starting from Jair Bolsonoro to Narendra 

Modi and ending with Boris Johnson or Vladimir Putin as well 

as Xi Jinping (Winnie the Pooh), Kim Jong Un and the whole kit 

and kaboodle of the neofascist rulers. While they are not yet

Hitlers, in their alliances  and similarities and commonalities in

decision making where they prioritize themselves and their 

supporters over the deaths of the many in their nations, they are

rulers of "cold command," though the "sneer" and the "wrinkled 

lip" may be hidden from the view of the populace. Shelley might 

have been an atheist but it is the prophetic voice that appears 

here that is Biblical in its resonance pronouncing to the king who

thinks he is God that he is only dust and will return to dust. 

Please do not think Islamic dictators are exempt. Or Aung San Su, from Shelley's scathing 

indictment. No ruler or government is. whether French, Australian, 

Canadian, German or Pakistani, Bhutanese, Bangladeshi, Nepalese, Syrian, Saudi Arabian, Yemeni,  

Iranian, Israelite (Benjamin Netanyahu), Iraqi, Afghanistani, Turkish (Erdogan), the Hamas,  

Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, neo-Nazi white supremacists groups like

the Knight Templars etc. I have extended the list to warlords and terror

-mongers too now, who lead such groups 

of all hues and shapes, varieties or sizes.

The  voice of the rebel and the unafraid who know that

the message of the traveller speaks the truth, and not that of

Ozymandias who is only a victim of megalomania

and verbose grandiloquence, and does not know that the King of 

Kings, the real one, catches the wise in their wisdom and the

crafty in their craftiness, as "He shews himself wise to the wise 

and crafty to the crafty" in the long run, so they are scattered

as specks of dust in the wind and in the sand nothing of them remains

except as a warning to future tyrants that they too are only grains of sand, not like the Blakean 

ones, but mere grains of sand. And how exactly does God overthrow tyranny?

Through poets like Shelley and the sculptor and even the traveller who brings the news,

as well as through the common people, through their hardiness, long-suffering, endurance,

persistence, perseverance, and rebellion or dissent or protest or silence or revolution 

or revolt, their steadfastness in holding on to the truth,

and if none of these things works, by spiritual forces or by divine intervention.

So what makes Shelley and this sonnet unique? It is unique as it is the poetic, prophetic voice that speaks the truth to power timelessly, much more effectively than Milton's Piedmont sonnet does.