Authority in Ozymandias and The Second Coming :: Ozymandias Essays

Authority in  Ozymandias and The Second Coming       Percy Bysshe Shelleys Ozymandias portrays the bygone advocator of authority symbolized by the erstwhile great world power of Egypt.  William Butler Yeats The Second Coming portrays the past power religion once had over the world, gradually lost ever since the end of Shelleys era of Romanticism.  Ozymandias was pen in a time when human rule coupled with unearthly guidance, but was slowly easing away from that old tradition as they entered the highly progressive era of the Victorians.  In his poem, Shelley was comparing the formally healthy Egyptian pharaohs antique and prideful form of rule with the unsuccessful futurity the traveller met in the desert with the ruins of the kings shattered visage (Longman, Shelley, p. 1710, l. 1 & adenosine monophosphate 4).  In a sense, Shelley was also saying that human rulership was just as easily able to fail as the once great and puissant world rule of Egypt once did, for ages.  Yeats also is alluding to this idea, but imposing his see to it on another type of rule once great for hundreds of old age of its rulership, that of Christianity or religion in general.  In The Second Coming he envisions the falcon of humanity drifting away and ignoring the falconer, Christian religions (Longman, Yeats, p. 2329, l. 2).  The falcon cannot take in the falconer/ Things fall apart says Yeats, depicting how human reliance on religion has become cold and disinterested in its lead any longer due to human progress of science, thus their loss of reliance and trustworthiness of religions claims.       Both Romantics and Modernists felt loss of authority, either from man or mans apparitional following.  Poetry changed what it focused on as those figures lost respect or importance in the publics lives.  I believe Yeats sums up my point part in lines 19 and 20, That twenty centuries of stony sleep/ Were vexed to incubus by a rocking cradle.