summary of poem king of king .
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The origins of “Ozymandias” were humble: a playful contest with a friend, Horace Smith, a jolly London poet-stockbroker, who was staying with Shelley at Marlow. A mutual friend, Leigh Hunt, the young editor of the radical Examiner magazine, liked to organise sonnet competitions; 15 minutes was the standard time allowed. (The next February Hunt set one up between Shelley, John Keats and himself. The topic was “The Nile”; the two poets dashed off theirs in style, while Hunt laboured on his until two in the morning.) Shelley’s poem and Smith’s were published in short succession in the Examiner the next year, Smith modestly regretting their proximity. Indeed, though his effort got better towards the end, it was hard to get straight-faced past the first two lines:
In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg…
The Muse had plainly dawdled. Shelley’s start was rocky, too. He got hung up first on “pedestal”, a tricky word to fit into a metre (“There stands by Nile a lone single pedestal”). Then he was bothered by the material the trunkless legs were made of (“marble/grey/brown”). A “sultry mist” crept in, distracting him for a while. Then he attributed a “gathered frown” to one of the legs. But oddly, on the recto of the page (Shelley having typically started off on the verso), the whole thing is written out in fair copy, as if it has effortlessly formed in his head
Probably it had. Much ink has been spilled discussing exactly where Shelley’s image, and the vaunting proclamation, came from, but possible sources were not far to seek. The most likely was Diodorus Siculus in his “Library of History”, which Shelley was reading around that time. Diodorus, writing in the first century BC, relayed Hecataeus’s description of the black-stone statue when it was standing complete in its temple in Thebes 300 years before. It was, said Hecataeus, the largest statue in Egypt; its foot alone was “more than seven cubits”, or ten and a half feet long. Diodorus, who had never seen it, straightforwardly called it “Ozymandias”, recorded the proclamation on the pedestal and said that this funerary temple “seems to exceed all others not only in the vast scale of its expense, but also in the genius of its builders.” It was not, however, ruined: the black stone contained “not a crack, not a flaw” in his day.
Shelley was probably also influenced, therefore, by an account of Thomas Legh’s “Narrative of a Journey in Egypt and the Country beyond the Cataracts” in the Quarterly Review for October 1816. This related that despite the proud words (which it repeated) on the colossal statue, no trace, save perhaps one “prostrate fragment”, now remained. Some pages on, however, and much deeper into Egypt, a Mr Banks had discovered an even bigger statue buried up to its shoulders in sand. Standing upon the tip of its ear, he could just reach to the middle of its forehead, from which he calculated that the length of the head was 12 feet (3.7 metres), and the height of the whole thing probably 84 feet, “far exceeding that of the supposed statue of the ‘King of Kings’.”
Answer:
Explanation:
In this poem he explains how we are selfish and we do not care about others while life is more about others, less about our self. Life is like a lottery ticket. We just need to scratch the surface to see the gold underneath it. The poem tells us about living our life with good basic rules to live it at its best.