A Long Farewell

"Nature was the same, as when she was the kind mother of the human race;
now, childless and forlorn, her fertility was a mockery;
her loveliness a mask for deformity" (329).
M. Shelley's The Last Man (1826)

Points for Reflection

M. Shelley's The Last Man (1826), chps 20-23

1. questions generated by students for in-class, roundtable discussion . . .

P. B. Shelley's "Ozymandias" (1817; 1818), PDF

1. why might Percy Bysshe Shelley have written about a pharaoh (Ramses II) who lived two millenia earlier? Does this poem merely represent a bit of playful historicizing?
2. why do you think Shelley does not allow the narrator himself to report the features of the fallen statue? Why is this poem delivered at one remove from the individual who witnessed the sculpture and pedestal?
3. what expression lies on the broken head?
4. to whose hand does line eight refer?

Petworth Park (1830
J. M. W. Turner

Dr. Paul Marchbanks
pmarchba@calpoly.edu