How Well Do You Know "Ozymandias"? Quiz

Answer:

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born in Warnham, Sussex, in 1792. His first published work was a Gothic novel named "Zastrozzi" (1810), written while he was still a pupil at Eton College. From there he went to University College, Oxford, but was expelled following the publication of a pamphlet entitled "The Necessity of Atheism".

The rest of his life was marked by a series of scandals. In August 1811 he eloped to Scotland with the sixteen-year-old Harriet Westbrook, a school friend of his sisters, and married her in Edinburgh. Harriet and he travelled around England, Wales and Ireland, while he became ever more involved in radical politics.

In May 1814 he fell in love with another teenage girl, Mary Godwin, and eloped (again) this time to Europe. In December 1816 the estranged Harriet drowned herself in the Serpentine in London's Hyde Park, enabling Shelley and Mary to marry. In 1818 they left England again and moved permanently to Italy. He died there in July 1822, aged only 29, when a small boat in which he was travelling sank during a storm.

Although Shelley wrote several long poems and plays, he is best remembered today for such short lyrical works such as "Ode to the West Wind" (1819) and "To a Skylark" (1820). "Ozymandias" was first published in 1818 in the weekly journal "The Examiner". Ozymandias was the Greek name for the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II. In 1817 the British Museum obtained a fragment of a large statue of Ramesses (known as the "Younger Memnon") and this is believed to have inspired Shelley to write his sonnet. The theme of the poem is the ephemeral nature of power and ambition: the original statue and its inscription were meant to inspire awe and respect in all who gazed on it, but now the ravages of time have caused the statue to collapse, and it lies almost forgotten in the desert.