Ozymandias
Each poetry anthology at GCSE contains 15 poems, and in your exam question you will be given one poem - printed in full - and asked to compare this printed poem to another. As this is a closed-book exam, you will not have access to the second poem, so you will have to know it from memory. Fifteen poems are a lot to revise. However, understanding four things will enable you to produce a top-grade response:
- The meaning of the poem
- The ideas and messages of the poet
- How the poet conveys these ideas through their methods
- How do these ideas compare and contrast with the ideas of other poets in the anthology
Below is a guide to Percy Shelley’s poem Ozymandias, from the Power and Conflict anthology. It includes:
- Overview: a breakdown of the poem, including its possible meanings and interpretations
- Writer’s Methods: an exploration of the poet’s techniques and methods
- Context: an exploration of the context of the poem, relevant to its themes
- What to Compare it to: ideas about which poems to compare it to in the exam
Exam Tip
Ozymandias is part of the Power and Conflict anthology of poems, and the exam question asks you to compare the ideas presented in two of these anthology poems.
It is therefore as important that you learn how Ozymandias compares and contrasts with other poems in the anthology, as understanding the poem in isolation. See the section below on ‘What to Compare it to’ for detailed comparisons of Ozymandias and other poems in the anthology.