Saturday, December 16, 2017

Synecdoche

Meditate on Shelley's synecdoche in his poem Ozymandias:
“Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them.”
“The hand” in the above lines refers to the sculptor who carved the “lifeless things” into a statue.

“Mocked” in Shelley’s context means, “made, fashioned” rather than “derided.” The sense of the word originates in the German “machen (gemacht)” and survives in engineering usage today in terms like “mock-up” for a crude prototype.

Or "The hand" refers to Ozymandias?

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