Power and Conflict comparison guide
Ozymandius and My Last Duchess
Corrupting power of humankind, power as a vehicle for exploitation
Pride and hubris acting as a downfall, aristocracy and giving an arrogance over all creation including mortality (MLD) and nature (Ozy)
Relation of the speaker to a God like entity or power over humanity and nature
“Notice Neptune, though, / Taming a sea-horse” - Neptune being a Greek God and therefore something so obviously above the inhuman inferior that is a “seahorse”
“My name is Ozymandius, king of kings: / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” - the biblical allusion to God being the King of Kings shows a complete insanity of mind in relation to Ozy’s power which has ultimately been forgotten
“My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name” and “My name is Ozymandius"
Painting (“that’s my last Duchess painted on the wall”) compared to a statue (“legs of stone / Stand in the desert”)
London
The Prelude
The Charge of the Light Brigade
Storm on the Island
Bayonet Charge
Remains and Exposure
Futility of war and the normalisation of violence, suffering becomes natural as war has no climax or end result except increasing death and trauma
If you win and survive a war, have you really won if you have to live with this permanent psychological torment of trauma
Poppies and War Photographer
Inner conflict from the perspective of an objective outsider to war as the speakers both struggle with their experiences of warfare from a distance
The idea of being ultimately powerless in the face of war is explored greatly in both. Poppies: a Mother being powerless in protecting her son (who has died) from the dangers and fatalities of war as she recognises that there was nothing she could have done to prevent his demise (“Before you left”, “I was brave”). War Photographer: a photographer realising how he must be a passive observer to war and destruction and that he must not intervene (and even if he did it would be futile). He experiences a crisis of morality as he finds himself in a position where he could potentially help against the fact that it is his job and payed obligation to capture these moments of stark and unfiltered reality. (“with spools of suffering set out in ordered rows.”, “A hundred agonies in black-and-white / from which the editor will pick out five or six”)