Poetry: Ozymandis and A Martian Sends A Postcard Home.

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Ozymandis and A Martian Sends A Postcard Home.

Discuss how any two of the poems studied on the unit organize language to explore themes of human experience.  Take care to quote directly from your chosen texts, illustrating how specific stylistic choices affect your reading practices. 

This paper discusses the how two poets use language and poetic technique to create and reinforce the themes in each of their poems.  Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ and Raine’s ‘A Martian Sends a Post Card Home’ are very different poems but they both recognise that individuals and groups view themselves as the set-point, the centre, of human experience and that other cultures or eras are distanced by this ego-centric view.  When our own human experience is described back to us it helps us see a sharper view of ourselves.  Shelley and Raine both magnify the human experience by having an ‘outsider’ reflect it back poetically to the reader.

In ‘Ozymandias’ the traveller tells the story of Ramesees II’s (Parr p32) hubris and contrasts it with the present state of his statue, a ‘colossal wreck’; making the point that power is not absolute, time decays it. This section of the paper proposes that Shelley has used a number of techniques to emphasise his theme, a few of which include; contrasting the sonnet’s Romantic poetic style with the archaic style of Ozymandias’ proclamation; judicious selection of figurative language; the use of a distancing narrator; and using variable pace and punctuation techniques. 

One of the most obvious ways Shelley creates ‘distance’ is in his use of ornamental, poetic language in the formal and structured sonnet form, which is emblematic of British romantic poetry genre (Spurr p35).  As this form was popular so it grounds the (then) contemporary reader in the poetic style of the day and adds distance between Shelley’s ‘present’; (1818) and Ozymandias’ own world of some 3000 years earlier; back when he was ‘king of kings’.  The proclamation “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” is vainglorious and stands in contrast to the Romantic, and relatively simple, following line: ‘Nothing beside remains.  Round the decay/of that colossal wreck,’

            Romantic, evocative language like ‘on the sand,/ half sunk, a shattered visage lies,’ and ‘these lifeless things’ all refer to how the ravages of time act upon what was once solid and incorruptible.  Shelley emphasises the distance between the despot and his people as well between ‘then’ and ‘now’ by referring to ‘an antique land’ and how Ozymandias’ inscription is ‘on a pedestal’; superior and distant. ‘Pedestal’ is an important word with significant placement; it is the first concept presented straight after the eighth line ‘volta’; where the poem turns around to make its final thematic point; that even the mighty fall from their pedestals.

            Shelley’s ‘traveler from an antique land’ is the storyteller and this creates further distance between the reader and the subject matter by re-telling of the tale.  By handing the story down through two storytellers, in the tradition of ancient fables, it gains an allegorical resonance as befits the theme.

            The pace of the poem has been constructed to be smoother in the beginning and end than in the body of the text.  Punctuation is sparse and enjambment lets the lines run on uninterrupted in the first and last few lines.  In the central body of the text is more heavily punctuated; giving the effect of slowing the pace and making the reading denser: ‘Near them, on the sand,/ Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,/ And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, . . .’.  By making the pace more staccato, the reader pays closer attention as though this is unfamiliar information.  At the end of the poem we’re returned to the more sweeping pace, where there is little punctuation to interrupt the description of the ravages of time: ‘boundless and bare/ The lone and level sands stretch far away.’  

Craig Raine’s ‘A Martian Sends A Postcard Home’ was first published in the New Statesman magazine, 1977 (New Statesman 2013). In the poem a Martian’s report defamilarises the commonplace accoutrement of everyday life and it shows us how our unimaginative, heuristic thinking blocks our ability to see the wonder in everyday life.  This section of the paper proposes that Raines uses a variety of poetic techniques to create the effect of culture clash and to highlight how we exist inside our earthly cultural conventions.  Some of these techniques include an extensive use of figurative language; the epistle style; a harking back to the traditions of nonsense poems and nursery rhymes; and the use of an other-world narrator.

The poem uses simile, metaphor and analogy extensively to propose riddles or puzzles for the reader to solve.  The first lines deal with a Martian’s description of books, a good place to start. Books represent the repository for human knowledge and, in drawing a likeness between a book and a bird, Raines may be subtly remarking the culture is flighty; thereby establishing the central premise of the poem.  In the beginning the subject matter, and its analogies, are quite ‘global’; starting with books (read culture) followed by weather (read nature) then machinery (perhaps referring to industry and commerce).  By Line 17 the subject has become more personal, exploring the ideas of time and the telephone (maybe a comment on the urgency of modern life).  Finally, Raines delves into the intimate, observing how adulthood imprisons until we dream: ‘At night, when all the colours die,/ they hide in pairs/ and read about themselves - / in colour, with their eyelids shut.’  There is much to be said, line by line, about the cleverness of Raines’ metaphors but the critical point is that the challenging, puzzling nature of his riddles forces the reader to re-evaluate their world and see it with fresh eyes.

            The poem is written in the style of an epistle; as with a postcard it’s laden with description of what the alien-tourist has seen; ‘I have never seen one fly but sometimes they perch on the hand.’  This technique serves to underscore the notion of ‘culture clash’.

There is a charm in the naivety and wisdom of the Martian’s observations that recalls the tradition of nursery rhymes and nonsense poems where silliness covers insight, much like Dr Seuss or Lewis Caroll: ‘And yet, they wake it up/ deliberately, by tickling with a finger.’ Echoing this genre, Raine uses couplets, but this time written in free verse, as one might expect from a letter.   

            The Martian narrator, with an (ironically) impressive grasp of the English language, has a child-like way of deconstructing the parts of a whole, describing them with whimsical detail and drawing out a central truth: ‘But time is tied to the wrist/or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.’  Here the Martian observes how our ‘capturing’ of time results in anxiety; we may imprison time in a box or on our wrists but paradoxically it also imprisons us.  The use of a complete alien enables Raines to pass comment (and its implicit partner, judgment) on at a societal, rather than individual, level and thereby emphasises the theme, the constraining force of earthly conventions, even more strongly.

            Though the two poems discussed come from different eras and stylistic traditions both are excellent examples of how the poet constructs language to support his central theme; in Raine’s case with ‘A Martian Sends a Post Card Home’ the theme is we can read the world afresh with a new view point and in Shelley’s poem ‘Ozymandias’ the decaying effects of time on power and civilisation.  Interestingly, both poems use an other-world narrator, extensive figurative language and many cultural references alongside references to poetic tradition to draw out these differences and elucidate their themes.

1067 words (plus 176 words of quotes)