Word Sliding into Photographic Stils──Form & the Use of Figures of Speech in Shelley's "Ozymandias

Poetry is, in part, a game played with words. Form is the frame in literary experience, meaning is the transformed fantasy. This essay is meant to approach Shelly’s "Ozymandias" to show how he portrayed that dream world, whose melancholy functioned an expression of the disillusion- ment and word-weariness, from the perspective of form and figures of speech. In this Petrarchan sonnet, what a reader could seek or experience is not the satisfaction of metrical pattern, but its variation; not the obvious extravagance of words, but its implied meaning.