Displaced Christian Images in Shelley's ‘Ozymandias’

Abstract

However convinced Shelley might have been about the necessity of atheism, he could not succeed to the line of great western poets without trenching in one way or another on the Judeo-Christian iconology from which their work derives. On some occasions the debt is explicit, most notably in Adonais 'his branded and ensanguined brow,jWhich was like Cain's or Christ's' (p. 153) but on others the religious images seem to have entered Shelley's poems almost unconsciously, as icons so widespread and pervasive that their religious origin has all but been effaced. 'Ozymandias' is a case in point. I have read the sonnet more times than I can recall, never pausing to ask myself why Shelley presented the statue in the way he did. After all, it is not an ecphrasis, and therefore has no external responsibility to the artefact it describes. According to Timothy Webb, Shelley might have been inspired by the illustrations to Richard Pococke's Description of the East (p. 194), but if this is so, they seem to have provided no more than a starting point. Although I do not have access to Pococke's original, I have been able to consult a Dutch translation (1776) in which the plates, keyed as they are into the text, must either have been borrowed from the original or have paraphrased them closely. One does indeed depict a statue of Memnon, massive-legged and placed on a plinth, but it is wholly intact and has, moreover, a benign facial expression. Another plate recording an image of Ozymandias the face of which is equally bland offers no scenic context, and therefore no sense of its scale. It is, moreover, diagrammatic in the extreme the hieroglyphic inscriptions, for example, are carefully enlarged. Clearly then, having no ecphrastic purpose in mind, Shelley's imagination broke down and recombined and recontextualized these fragmentary suggestions, and, in the process, fell back on iconographic habits so central to western art that they might well have risen unbidden from the unconscious. As a result of reading Salvatore Settis's brilliant book on Giorgione, I have found myself sensitized to visual idiosyncrasies in the poem that I had never before paused to analyze. Why, for example, does Shelley delete the trunk of the statue, and confront the viewer only with the legs on the plinth, and why