Living Forms: Romantics and the Monumental Figure

Chapter 9: “Those Speechless Shapes”: Shelley’s Rome

He lingered, poring on memorials Of the world’s youth, through the long burning day Gazed on those speechless shapes. . . . —Shelley, “Alastor” THE MARLOW POEMS At the very time Shelley was composing “Ozymandias,” the Count de Forbin was journeying through Egypt, encountering “with a sort of terror . . . mountainous figures wrought by the hand of man, who had even engraven his image upon them.”1 The man-made “image” of man had been meant to give these monumental shapes a permanent human memory, but their massive objecthood left them with the blank monumentality of natural things. For the artist and archeologist Baron Denon (a member of Napoleon’s expedition to Upper Egypt and future director of the Louvre museum), not only the size of the figures but their “want of decided expression” of face or body made them seem to belong outside, in a world of things. If the Egyptian colossi, like the Laocoon, had been distorted to “express some violent passion,” they would not have been “eminently monumental, a character which should belong peculiarly to that out-door sculpture, which is intended C H A P T E R N I N E
“Those Speechless Shapes”: Shelley’s Rome 193 to harmonize with architecture, a style of sculpture which Egyptians have carried to the highest pitch of perfection.”2 To Byron, the most expressive forms were not those found in nature but those made by man. He argued to William Lisle Bowles, St. Peter’s, the Coliseum, the Pantheon, the Palatine, the Apollo, the Laocoon, the Venus di Medicis, the Hercules, the dying Gladiator, the Moses of Michel Agnolo, and all the higher works of Canova . . . are as poetical as Mont Blanc or Mount Ætna, perhaps still more so, as they are direct manifestations of mind, and presuppose poetry in their very conception; and have, moreover, as being such, a something of actual life, which cannot belong to any part of inanimate nature, unless we adopt the System of Spinosa, that the World is the deity. (L&J 5: 547–8) These remarks probably responded not only to Bowles but also to Wordsworth, who saw much human meaning in nature’s “mighty objects.” Although in Childe Harold IV some forms like the “nameless column” and the tomb of Cecilia Metella remain opaque, the “poetical ” ones, including several mentioned in his letter, are readable as “direct manifestations of mind.” They have “something of actual life, which cannot belong to any part of inanimate nature.” Don Juan’s account of Haidée’s lingering death alludes for a visual comparison to the Gladiator’s “ever-dying . . . air” and the Laocoon’s “all eternal throes.” In those “exquisitely chiselled” figures, however, it is the “marble’s unchanged aspect,” the appearance of the form as a whole, which though “still the same,” is as vital and expressive as the emotive features themselves. As I have noted, Shelley sought both kinds of “expression” in the sculptures he studied: the depiction of transient human feeling no less than the formal embodiment of eternal ideas of beauty and power: Byron’s manifestations of mind. Both are in play in “Ozymandias,” the most familiar of the poems of the Marlow period (fall and winter 1817–18). I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desart. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, 194 LIVING FORMS 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. (Dec. 1817) Much of the poem’s stunning complexity lies in the interplay between the enduring, mute presence of matter as against the receding presence of man’s image, words, and intentions. Although the first speaker, the “I,” begins the sonnet with an abstract narration, itself unlocated as to time or place, the traveler’s theatrical presentation of stone objects creates a place and stages an event—the pedestal’s utterance. The strongly positional “stands,” “lies,” “appears,” and “near them” give the poem body as well. With the sudden...