Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Sonnet Analysis: Horace Smith

I here present analysis of a historical oddity. The poem below was written by Horace Smith at the same time, and under the same title, as the infinitely more famous poem "Ozymandias" composed by his friend Percy Bysshe Shelley. The poems were written on a single theme and published in the same publication (albeit a few weeks apart). I do not at this time feel prepared to present analysis of Shelley's "Ozymandias," which for purposes of full disclosure I should admit I consider to be my favorite of all the sonnets I have ever read, but Mr. Smith's poem (originally titled "Ozymandias" as well, but later published as "On A Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below") is I believe unduly unrecognized, and therefore I present it for your pleasure and my analysis below:

In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows.
"I am great Ozymandias," saith the stone,
"The King of kings: this mighty city shows
The wonders of my hand." The city's gone!
Naught but the leg remaining to disclose
The sight of that forgotten Babylon.
We wonder, and some hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when through the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the wolf in chase,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What wonderful, but unrecorded, race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

Triumphs:
Smith may not be Shelley (and who else was?) but he has a gift for individual phrases that lilt perfectly into the meter and reinforce the sense of loss and emptiness in the poem. "The sight of that forgotten Babylon" and "Once dwelt in that annihilated place" are both very strong, particularly in the last two words (apparently Smith liked two word, six syllable endings to his lines, or they liked him). The execution of the octave/sestet division is handled very well, with the classic Italianate turn and end-stopping of the last line of the octave. The rhythm is extremely strong, particularly in the sestet - the line "Where London stood, holding the wolf in chase" has a delightful trochaic substitution in "holding" that launches into the "chase." A similar effect comes from the trochaic substitution of "Wonder" in "Wonder like ours, when through the wilderness," as the hiccup in the line seems to correspond to the stupefying effect of the wonder.

Imperfections:
It is perhaps unfair to attempt to gauge the imperfections of a poem whose greatest imperfection may be said to be "not to have been Shelley's 'Ozymandias'," but I shall do my best without reference to Shelley's poem. Schematically, I find the greatest imperfection to be Smith's choice to describe the leg as "all alone" in the first line: it rather spoils the reveal of "the city's gone!/Naught but the leg remaining," because we already know that it is there solus. The grotesqueness of the "gigantic Leg," while possibly an intentional effect to alienate the reader, is regrettably rather off-putting towards the poem as well, and also rather distracting: why does the leg have an inscription? This is somewhat ameliorated by Smith's alternate title, but it is still somewhat nagging. There is also a bit of a cough in the line ""I am great Ozymandias," saith the stone," which seems to want to have twelve syllables (Ozymandias must be only four and saith only one to make it scan as pentameter, but each seems to want to have one more). In that same line the "great" seems almost unnecessary, since its insertion actually makes it more difficult to throw the stress in the first foot on the "I," which seems like it should have it instead of the "am;" without the "great," the line scans as iambic pentameter with an omitted first unstressed syllable, but with it one is forced into a trochaic substitution to get the stress onto the "I," leading to two consecutive unstressed syllables, but not ones that can be slid over smoothly (especially since "great," as a monosyllable that is not an article, preposition, or conjunction, wants to take emphasis itself).

Contrast to Shelley:
While I do not intend to fully analyze Shelley's poem here, it seems worthwhile to point out to the casual reader a couple of points where Smith's poem seems weak only in contrast to Shelley's, as explanation for why it has been so disregarded. First, Shelley does not locate Ozymandias in any specific place, unlike Smith's "Egypt," which gives it a more haunting, unlocalizable feel, which allows Shelley to also dispense with Smith's explicit "This could be London" moral, because Shelley's poem already presents the statue as something that could be anywhere. Second, Shelley words the statue's inscription more simply and yet more impressively than Smith: "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings/Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair" seems both more dignified and more elevated than Smith's inscription. And finally, possibly because of the space saved by avoiding an explicit moral, Shelley is able to spend much more time on the statue itself and its implications for the world it inhabited before its destruction, which paradoxically allows the poem to have more impact than Smith's explicit declaration can. None of this is Smith's particular fault - as mentioned above, his greatest failing in this regard is simply not to have been Shelley, and who is? - which is why I have not placed these points above in the list of imperfections of this poem as it stands on its own. But given the poem's unique place in relation to Shelley's poem, it is reasonable to give some consideration to why the one has survived so strongly and the other has not.

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