Authority in Ozymandias and The Second Coming :: Ozymandias Essays

Authority in  Ozymandias and The Second Coming       Percy Bysshe Shelleys Ozymandias portrays the past power of authority symbolized by the erstwhile big world power of Egypt.  William pantryman Yeats The Second Coming portrays the past power religion once had over the world, gradually lost ever since the end of Shelleys period of Romanticism.  Ozymandias was written in a time when human rule coupled with religious 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 powerful Egyptian pharaohs antique and prideful form of rule with the unsuccessful future the traveller met in the desert with the ruins of the kings tatterdemalion visage (Longman, Shelley, p. 1710, l. 1 & 4).  In a sense, Shelley was also saying that human rulership was just as easily able to fail as the once great and powerful world rule of Eg ypt once did, for ages.  Yeats also is alluding to this idea, but imposing his view on another type of rule once great for hundreds of years 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 discover the falconer/ Things fall apart says Yeats, depicting how human reliance on religion has become cold and disinterested in its lead anymore payable 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 religious following.  Poetry changed what it cerebrate on as those figures lost respect or importance in the publics lives.  I believe Yeats sums up my point partially in lines 19 and 20, That xx centuries of stony sleep/ Were vex ed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.