Kate in the Elizabethan Era

At the end of Shakespeare’s play, was Kate really “tamed”? It might appear to the rest of the characters that she was tamed, but her speech at the end didn’t fool the audience. Kate is quite intelligent and full of passion, and I don’t think she was broken so easily. While those men betting on her obedience might agree Petruccio “hast tamed a cursed shrew”, she is choosing rather to put on a disguise. She cleverly disguises herself as an obedient wife as a way to ensure she can live in harmony with the dominant patriarchal society.
The views of society in the Elizabethan Era are expressed in “The Taming of the Shrew”. Women are meant to be obedient and are prized for their silence. They are meant to be submissive and used. They are treated much like animals—betted on and coerced to submission. There are many references in the play alluding to Kate being a cat or a falcon who’s being domesticated, in a sense, by Petruccio. Marriage is based on economics mostly as well as your social standing. This Patriarchal Society was dominated by men and women were given no freedom, justice, or even allowed to have any original thoughts, much less express them. They were molded by society and used for economic gain and bearing children.
Kate knows the expectations of a woman in her society, and she is initially conflicted with fitting in while retaining her intelligence. At the end of the play where she is giving her speech, we come to the conclusion that she has matured and found a way to both balance her place in a patriarchal society and her outspokenness and intelligence. While her speech is sickeningly subservient, the fact that she is even talking to a room full of men about her opinions is that side of Kate that will never be tamed. In the end, she finds it the best for everyone for her to disguise herself as an obedient wife. While she is not “tamed” per se, she has matured and has found a way that everyone wins.

Shakespeare's Stage

Act three, scene two does a great job at using language to get the reader to imagine what the characters looked like and how they acted during the wedding. The wedding isn’t actually staged in front of us, but rather it is described to the reader by someone who was at the wedding. Shakespeare also writes in clues to the reader earlier in the scene about the time of day it takes place, where it takes place, and how strangely Petruccio was dressed for the wedding.

The scene opens with clues about the time of day and which day it is. Baptista says, “Signoir Lucentio, this is the ‘pointed day/ That Katherine and Petruccio should be married…” (1-2). Petruccio, after he arrives says, “The morning wears. ‘Tis time we were at church” (112). From these clues worked into the dialogue, we get the day, the time of day, and the setting and purpose of the scene. The main conflict in the scene is the ridiculous manner in which Petruccio arrives to his own wedding. His clothing is described in lengthy detail by a servant who has arrived ahead of Petruccio and Grumio. This is a completely overwhelming description to Baptista and Tranio, but to the audience it is easy to find the comedy in his appearance even before he arrives. The audience is also able to guess at why he is dressed so absurdly. Tranio says, “’Tis some odd humor pricks him to this fashion…” (71). This gives a huge clue to the audience that Petruccio dressed like this on purpose, and we are able to infer that it is to embarrass and bewilder Katherine. Later in the scene, we don’t actually witness the wedding, but Shakespeare writes in a brilliantly humorous description of the unorthodox wedding. Gremio says, “This mad-brained bridegroom took him in such a cuff/ That down fell priest and book, and book and priest” (165-66). When we get a description of something funny from another person, it becomes funnier as we try to relive it in our imagination. This is why this secondary view of the wedding was so effective at capturing the humor and ridiculousness of the situation Petruccio is causing.

Eveline

Joyce’s short story, “Eveline”, depicts the classic story of a teenage girl determined to run away with her lover in order to escape her current oppressive life, although with a more realistic ending. She has met this wonderful man, Frank, who would be able to take her to places across the world that she longs to see. Her life at home is demanding and her father is overbearing; like most eldest daughters, she has taken on the duties and position of her mother after her mother died. Throughout the story, she is contemplating the meaning and worth of her life at home, and what it would be like if she left with Frank. As most young women with plans to escape would do, she argues back and forth with herself, trying to decide the best thing to do for her and her family whom she has an obligation to take care of. She experiences a sudden epiphany while she is reliving her mother’s death. “Escape! She must escape! Frank would save her. He would give her life, perhaps love, too…She has a right to happiness. Frank would take her in his arms, fold her in his arms. He would save her” (40). Eveline’s epiphany is that she wants to be happy and escape with Frank, to start a new life and new adventure with someone she loves. Her epiphany, however, is not carried though as paralysis grips Eveline and stops her from carrying out her dream. She is overwhelmed with family ties, her promise to her mother to keep their home together, and her duty at home. She ends up doing what her mother did—something she firmly resolved she wasn’t going to do. Instead of escaping she clings to the familiar and the safe, destined to live her continuously repetitive life in Dublin safe in non-changing circumstances and mindless chores.

Gogol & Kafka

Kafka’s Metamorphosis reminds me a lot of The Nose by Gogol. Both of these stories are set in mundane settings and feature absurd events. Metamorphosis tells of a man who transforms into a giant insect one morning and The Nose features a high-ranking official who suddenly loses his nose and searches the city to find it. As absurd as both of them are, they are also each using their stories as a metaphor to comment on the absurdness, randomness, and uncertainty of the social capitalist world.

There are many things in Metamorphosis that suggest that Kafka’s novella is a metaphor for contemporary society. The first and most suggestive is the fact that the protagonist is transformed into a large insect and is viewed by everyone around him as vermin. This can translate to how the middle or lower working classes are seen by the higher classes and those of high station in the government as “vermin” or dirty. Also, Kafka uses the unfamiliar within the mundane and inverts the typical system of justice and right and wrong in order to portray the reality of the social order in society—randomness and absurdness often overcome justice and order. Kafka targets capitalist society and its alienation of low to middle class workers and shows through Gregor’s metamorphosis into an insect, and his eventual death, that the good don’t die young. It is important to pick details out from the story—such as Gregor’s desire to make it to work even once he has found out he’s an insect or his family’s reaction to him once he transformed—so that you can understand that while it is merely a story, there is a lot of meaning behind the actions of the characters and the metaphors carefully placed throughout the story.

Gogol’s story, The Nose has a lot conceptually in common with Metamorphosis. In Gogol’s story a very materialistic major loses his nose, which he later finds, reattaches, and continues on with his life as materialistic and womanizing as before. In Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Gregor, a slave to his social and economic class, is turned into a grotesque insect and later dies of the melancholy of alienation due to his appearance. Gogol’s story, much like Kafka’s, targets the Aristocratic class and the meddling government bureaucracy and conveys that randomness and absurdness will always have a place in the world, and that materialists stay materialists and justice is short lived and often non-existent. Both of these stories comment on the desensitization of those who are “formed” by contemporary society. This is seen through Gregor’s transformation into a vermin and Kovaliov’s embarrassment at the loss of his nose.

“...are there not absurd things everywhere?—and yet, when you think it over, there really is something in it. Despite what anyone may say, such things do happen—not often, but they do happen” (Gogol, The Nose).

The most thoroughly cited paragraph EVER

The German-Jewish-Czech Kafka was famed for his portrayals of alienation and faceless bureaucracy. All of Kafka’s works are marked by an impressively created sense of hopelessness and an absence of a more optimistic future. Nowhere is the individual able to escape the authoritarian and hierarchal structures of family and society. In The Metamorphosis, protagonist Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find himself turned into a vermin. He tries to convince himself to feel normal, but his incomprehensible condition as an insect proves otherwise. The Metamorphosis is an allegorical tale, which means that the events symbolize a more general human condition in modern society and depict the "profound danger to humanity of the demands of bourgeois acquisitive life”. The reification of human relationships in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century due to social and historical upheavals resulted in the general feeling of rootlessness and alienation among people. The fragmentation of society and life evoked a sense of inner anguish and anxiety. This culminated in the themes of loss, loneliness, and meaninglessness of life. Kafka belonged to this modern period of alienation and disorientation. His protagonists are, therefore, portrayed as estranged victims leading an Absurd life in a familiar yet a strange world. Applying the context of alienation to Kafka’s novella, we can view Gregor's transformation as an extended metaphor, carried from abstract concept to concrete reality: trapped in a meaningless job and isolated from the human beings around him, Gregor is thought of as an insect by himself and by others, so he becomes one. His vision of lonely individuals trapped in bureaucratic or legal labyrinths can be seen as a powerful metaphor for modern experience.

Poe's Short Stories

Edgar Allen Poe, the master of short stories, filled his stories with mystery, death, anger, murder, and perverseness. Three of his stories that all contain these characteristics are “The Black Cat”, “Tell Tale Heart”, and “The Cast of Amontillado”. All three of these short stories share characteristics with each other that exemplify common themes that Poe writes about.
At the beginning of many of his stories, especially in “The Black Cat” and “Tell Tale Heart”, Poe includes a sort of disclosure from the narrator declaring or explaining something. In “The Black Cat” and “Tell Tale Heart”, there is an explanation of why the narrator isn’t crazy for what he eventually goes on to say he did. In “The Cask of Amontillado”, the narrator makes a similar disclosure but this time explaining why he was murdering Fortunado in the first place. These explanations at the beginning of these stories are really interesting because they are walking the reader through these very logical, lucid points and you begin the story thinking the narrator is quite rational and clear headed. As you read the story and are a witness to the perverse crimes that the narrator commits, you question his sanity and you are conflicted with whether he is crazy or in fact as rational as he says he is. This is a very clever way of confusing the reader and giving the narrator some extra depth. In “The Cask of Amontillado” the narrator explains to the reader why he wants revenge on Fortunado and vaguely tells us that there were some injuries done unto him by Fortunado, and later insult on top of that. At the end of the story, however, when you realize that the narrator, Montresor, murders this man because of some injuries committed against him, you question whether he is sane or not.
Another theme that appears in all three of these stories is the perverseness of man. This theme is shown through the narrator’s actions in each of the stories and questions the reader whether this perverseness could be found in them, in all men. This “heart of darkness” or “perverseness” is found in “Tell Tale Heart” when the narrator kills the old man simply because his “evil eye” is bothering him. It’s also found in “The Black Cat” when the narrator cuts out the cat’s eye because he thought the cat had ignored him and then goes on to later kill his wife with an axe and buries her behind a wall of bricks. “Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart - one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man” (Poe, Black Cat). Poe suggests that this impulse to commit perverse acts is found in all men and it is only a matter of time before it is acted upon. This spirit of perverseness is also found in “The Cask of Amontillado” when the narrator, just like the one in “The Black Cat” murders his victim based only on a minor dispute and disposes of the body behind a brick wall.
Seeing that Poe was an alcoholic himself, it is no surprise that alcohol is found to affect many of the narrators in his stories. In “The Black Cat”, alcohol is what the narrator claims to have led him to cut the cat’s eye out and he used alcohol to drown his guilt of the occurrence. In “The Cask of Amontillado”, wine and alcohol is what eventually leads to Fortunato’s death. I feel that with Poe, he incorporates a lot of his ideas, thoughts, and problems into his stories and maybe even uses his stories to vicariously commit crimes or do things that he wouldn’t be able to do in reality.

"Daddy" in a Cheeseburger!

In her poem “Daddy”, Silvia Plath uses vivid imagery and metaphors to express her relationship with the men in her life. Using Nazi and Jew imagery as a metaphor, she is able to communicate to her readers the trauma of the oppression of her father and husband. She takes images of concentration camps, prisons, stomping feet, and swastikas and associates them with her father and husband while she compares herself to the Jews, the victim. “You do not do, you do not do any more, black shoe in which I have lived like a foot for thirty years, poor and white, barely daring to breathe or Achoo” (1-5). The many Nazi images that she uses, accompanied by a lot of symbolism incorporated into those metaphors build emotion and sympathy for the reader. The symbolism is important in expressing her ideas because certain symbols she uses are widely recognized and have attached emotions and relations. Using such extreme symbols and images is what allows her to express how traumatic her experience was.


Revised
In her poem “Daddy”, Silvia Plath applies vivid imagery and metaphors to express her relationship with the men in her life—her father and husband. Using Nazi and Jew imagery and symbolism as a metaphor, she is able to communicate to her readers the trauma of the oppression forced upon her by her father and husband. She builds emotion and tension between images of concentration camps, prisons, stomping feet, and swastikas and associates them with her opressive father and husband while she compares herself to the Jews, the tortured victim. “You do not do, you do not do/ Any more, black shoe/ In which I have lived like a foot for thirty years, poor and white,/ Barely daring to breathe or Achoo” (1-5). The many Nazi images that she uses, accompanied by a lot of symbolism incorporated into those metaphors build emotion and sympathy for the reader. The symbolism is important in expressing her ideas because certain symbols she uses are widely recognized and have attached emotions and relations. “Not God but a swastika/ So black no sky could squeak through./ Every woman adores a Fascist,/ The boot in the face, the brute/ Brute heart of a brute like you” (46-50). These symbols and imagery such as the Swastika, the idea of the Fascist, a black boot, and the color black are symbols that have a universal and cultural understanding and emotions attached to them. Through the utilization of these symbols and imagery she can transfer her emotions to her writing, and then to her reader. Using such extreme symbols and images are what allow her to fully express how traumatic her life with her father and husband was.

A problem with my first paragraph was that I didn't use enough examples and explanation of those examples to argue the point of the paragraph. Also, I argued in more of a general sense, rather than on close reading. In the revised paragraph, I added more quotes and explanation of those quotes and I tried to delve deaper into how the symbolism effects the close reading and emotion of the poem. I think that the revisions helped to build the argument more, but I felt that I wasn't able to incorporate enough close reading into the broader argument.

Thesis Time

In “Ode to a Nightingale”, Keats uses the nightingale’s song as a metaphor for his desire for transcendence and self expression through poetry and the continuous presence beauty found in life.

"The Very Old Man with Enormous Wings"...Huh?

This short story by Marquez has one theme in common with all of the stories I read in my Supernatural and Fantasy comparative literature class—the eruption of the fantastic within the mundane. This theme is found in the works of Poe, Fuentes, Gogol, and Kafka. This leaves the reader guessing and often illustrates a point the author wants to make about the world we live in. Authors use this theme of fantastic elements within the frame of a mundane setting to create ambivalent feelings of both familiarity and uncertainty. In the case of “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”, the setting is very mundane and when this old man appears with wings, the reader then becomes conflicted with the question: is this old man supernatural or is he human?
Throughout the whole story, the old man is described to us as very human. “He was dressed like a ragpicker. There were only a few faded hairs left on his bald skull and very few teeth in his mouth, and his pitiful condition of a drenched great-grandfather had taken away any sense of grandeur he might have had(43). His appearance is completely mundane and pitiful all at once, while the existence of his wings confuses our perception of him. We want to associate him with an angel, but he has none of the “accepted” qualities of an angel. He does not appear majestic, immortal, or regal and he doesn’t have the “proud dignity of angels”. The whole neighborhood ends up “…having fun with the angel, without the slightest reverence, tossing him things to eat through the openings in the wire as if he weren’t a supernatural creature but a circus animal”(44). Despite the torment by the neighborhood, the old man stays very introverted and mysterious and we learn nothing from him about his magical abilities or why he is there.
It was obvious that the narrator in this story, as with most other supernatural tales, is very unreliable. We don’t know if we are getting the truth or perception and we don’t get answers to many of our questions. The author meant to lead us through the story with an unrealiable narrator to add an air of mystery and to keep the reader constantly questioning whether events are real or fantastic. The old man is presented to us through unreliable narration. We don't get answers to any of our questions. Is he really an angel? This unreliable narration is what creates the tension between reality and fantasy. It is sort of like an urbanized fairytale. In this urbanized fairytale, Marquez is using the mundane imagery and combining them with the supernatural to contradict the supernatural stereotypes—and stereotypes in general—that our society uses. Angels aren't necessarily white and majestic as we have learned to accept, but maybe they are old grandfather-like men who sing like a sailor. He is getting us to question conventional religious and social norms. Marquez might want to challenge these social norms because, as an artist, he’s pushing the envelope and maybe he is trying to express how society often will not accept things that aren’t familiar to them.
This story could be a “tale for children” because, like many other fairytales, there is a moral to the story (okay, maybe two). The first and most obvious moral is not to let social norms effect the way you see a person or even a religion. The neighbors along with the parents were making assumptions about the old man based on social norms in that village. The parents of the child were pressing their beliefts on the child when they made sure that the child not go anywhere near the chicken coup. And so the cycle goes. This “tale for children” is saying that we should not be so ready to accept those traditional beliefs and socialized images of beauty because image is not everything. Second moral—listen to your mother and father or you might be smited by god and turned into a giant spider by the stoke of a lightning bolt. Enough said.

Just Another Day?

Just Another Day?

In a station
ever
cold and hard
I wait for

the train
when she suddenly
appears
light in dark

I’m spellbound
bright flecks of color
so sweet
such beauty

Rather than making up my topic for the parody of Williams’ mundane poem, I thought I would take the topic from Pound’s “A Station of the Metro” and incorporate it into the form of Williams’ poem. Pound’s poem is definitely mundane in setting and although the tone is more intense and emotional then Williams’, I thought it would be fun putting the two together. I have taken my interpretation of Pound’s poem and made that the content of my poem while I have taken the form of Williams’ poem and applied that to the content. The stanzas, punctuation/capitalization, and number of syllables in all of the lines and title are the same as those in Williams’.
In Williams’ poem, “This is Just to Say”, the tone is very light and insincere. It wouldn’t have worked well to take the content from Pound’s poem and make it very light and conversational. Although Pound’s poem was very mundane in setting and characters, it was full of emotion and expression. I tried to keep that emotion, using Williams’ form. My parody was meant as a blend of both authors, definitely not mocking.

Urn=Poetry?

One of my favorite poems so far has been “Ode to a Grecian Urn” by Keats. In it is found a common theme—immortality in art. The desire for immortality through art has been found in many of the poems that we have read so far in response to the fear of death and aging. Though not expressed directly, these author’s writings are a way of living on after death. This fear of death and the desire for immortality is found not only in both of Keats’ poems that we read, but also in Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 73”.

What I thought was interesting about “Ode on a Grecian Urn” was that he is longing to be immortal and happy as the images on the urn are, but he is also immortalizing himself through his poetry. In a way, the urn is a metaphor for poetry in general. Some tell stories of young lovers and peaceful cities whose images live on as long as the poetry still exists. Also, urns are beautiful creations that eventually hold the ashes of the dead. This can also be compared to how a poem expresses the author’s style and point of view even once he dies. A part of that author will always be with the poem, will be found inside the poem.

Imagery in the Metro

While we are spending time on metaphors and imagery, a poem that really well represents both metaphors and imagery is “In a Station of the Metro” by Ezra Pound. It’s a poem that is simply two lines long, and one metaphor, but it is a metaphor full of pictures, smells, sights, sounds, and experiences. We never really talked much about this poem, but it is so powerful and so full of imagery that I think it is worth discussing.

“In a Station of the Metro”
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

I was originally unsure of where to go with this poem. It seemed so simple, almost not enough. This poem, however, is a true modernistic poem. It is set in an urban setting, with few words that all contribute to a meaning or image that the poet wants to express. It expresses a precise visual experience through a very expressive metaphor. It is the use of this metaphor that gives the reader of this poem a very crisp visual of the metro and people he sees while he is at the station. The atmosphere and landscape of the station is visualized in your head and the image of these faces, petals appearing out of the trains during is such an everyday commonplace thing yet something that people wouldn’t necessarily notice as beautiful or striking.

I found three pictures that I feel encompass the visuals and emotions I get from this poem. The first one is a picture of a Paris metro station. This station is full of shadow and harshness, cold and unfriendly. It is a representation of the everyday, the mundane. Metro stations are cold, hard and dirty, a dark place where people travel to and fro.

The next picture is one that represents the apparition of “these faces in the crowd”. These kisses are things that are beautiful that appear in the background of the mundane making the mundane, black background special.

This last picture is one of a beautiful woman walking the streets of Paris with a confident elegant air. I think that this picture represents the time period in which Pound wrote this poem and together with the other pictures expresses the line, “Petals on a wet, black bough”. Pound wrote this poem about the faces in a station of the Paris metro that he saw as petals in a mundane background. It seems that these “petals” must have been faces of women which drew his attention through the crowd in the busy, cold metro.

Looking at this poem as a metaphor, the first line is the tenor and the second line is the vehicle, more abstract. The author uses distinct words on the line that is the vehicle so he can create the image of the faces in the crowd that appear so beautiful to him. The words that he uses create a complicated metaphor yet a vivid image of the beautiful in the mundane. Petals are beautiful and elegant, feminine. Wet, black boughs are hard looking, dark, and slippery. In only two lines, Pound has created a vivid image, yet there is no kind of emotion that I can find. It could be that he wants to write the poem exactly how he experienced the situation. Maybe he was waiting for a train, reading a paper, when these beautiful women stepped off the train and he couldn’t help but noticed how they brightened the station as they walked off with their children or baggage.

Life, Death, and Time in Sonnet 73

I recently finished a book by a famous medium, Concetta Bertoldi, called “Do Dead People Watch You Shower?” The book answered many questions about life and death and in between. I was struck by her explanation that we are indeed reincarnated into different bodies and different situations because we are meant each time to learn a certain “life lesson”. She explains that we are not new souls, but we are the same soul living different lives each time we are sent to earth by God. (And by the way, apparently dead people do watch us shower…those we knew are always with us in spirit.)

This is why upon reading Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 I was reminded of this book about life beyond death and the pressure of time and aging on all of us. I felt that although the literal reading of this poem would be to conclude that Shakespeare is implying that life ends when you die, there is not necessarily a definitive end to you once you die.

Sonnet 73
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

All of the metaphors in this poem are nature related—the cycle of fall to winter, the cycle of twilight to night, and of fire to ashes. Looking at these on a less literal level, you can see that these are associated with Mother Nature, Father Time, and the cycle of life. You can either see these cycles as ending at winter or night or ashes, or you can see them as the coming of spring, the coming of dawn, and the rebirth of a phoenix. While the poem is rather pessimistic and there is an impending sense of doom and death, it seems Shakespeare was more concerned with the loss of youth, time, and love than of death itself.

The focus of this poem is time. Time creeps slowly up on us and when we finally realize it, many years have passed and we have lost that youth we once prized. I love the line: “Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest” (8). What is Death’s second self? Could it be a name for the Grimm Reaper? Father Time? Sleep? Night? Quite possibly it means all of those things. We are all fascinated with time and aging and the timeline that is our life. We make plans to do certain things before a certain age because we only live once. But do we really? We are broken harted when we a loved one has passed, but are they entirely gone? Or are they with us in spirit? It’s up to you whether we live once or whether we are reincarnated.
Suppose we did live more than once. Would that make you any less fearful of time and death? Shakespeare’s Sonnet 59 says,

“If there be nothing new, but that which is
Hath been before, how are our brains beguil'd,
Which labouring for invention bear amissThe second burthen of a former child.”

This sonnet addresses the possibility of reincarnation and the possibility that nothing is entirely new and nothing ever completely dies. This is what makes time so ambiguous.

While it isn’t clear whether Shakespeare really believed in reincarnation or life after death, his Sonnet 73 inspired me to question metaphors for death and time he used in his sonnet. His sonnet included cycles of life and death and the pressure of time on life and love. Depending on how you want to look at it, Shakespeare's sonnet is either a pessimistic view on death, or a realization that love and life are cycles that end in death but starts again in life. Whether or not Shakespeare was actually afraid of dying and of time eventually consuming him, he should not have been because he obviously lives through his timeless writing today and for many years to come.

Form vs. Prose

If a poem was written in the same format as an essay or letter it would not have the same effect as it would in poetic form. A poem is broken up into separate lines to emphasize the drama, emotion, and meaning that the author is trying to express. Without poetic form the author’s imagery and expression is lost. A good example of how poetic form works to produce dramatic and meaningful lines is in Ozymandias by Percy Shelley. The last sestet of this poem reads:

“And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

(Prose)
On the base were these words:
“My name is Ozymandias, the greatest king of all:
All those rich and powerful, look at what I have created and give up hope!”
Nothing beside the statue remains. Around the decay of the tall statue, vast and bare
The lonely and flat sand stretches far in every direction.

It’s clear that the prose version is not as powerful as the original version and is much more boring! Every word that the author put into this poem was chosen to serve a specific purpose, to cater to a specific emotion or image. That’s what poetry is—the art of creating images and emotion through words.

Authors break poems into separate lines at certain strategic points because people automatically put a break in what they are reading at the end of a line (I do at least). This break can cause people to, in a way, break up their thought process once a line ends. The way that the ending lines of this poem are broken up gives extra emotion and extra emphasis to what is happening. The second and third lines deliver such a strong proclamation that the pause at the end of the third line adds extra contrast to the next line. The sentence, “Nothing beside remains.” is so strong and delivers such a strong visual and dramatic change to the poem. The form at the end of this poem strengthened the impression of the ironic and tragic end to a king that was so vast in power. While clearly the prose simplified the poem into something anyone could understand, the way that the commas, periods, vocabulary, and line breaks are placed in the original poem delivers a much more interesting, dramatic, and thoughtful poem. Clearly, poems aren’t meant to be easy to understand. Where would be the fun in that? : )