Explain, with reference to specific quotations and language effects, what Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” adds to our understanding of the nature of ambition.
In the Percy Shelley’s Sonnet Ozymandias past tense is used to show us the temporariness of ambitions rewards. In the end of the \first quatrain, while describing what is left of Ozymandias’s statue, Shelley says ” the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed” if we think of this as Ozymandias’s “the King of Kings” hand and heart, then the hand is mocking the gods and the heart that fed off his subjects until he achieved his goals. Obviously Ozymandias was a incredibly ambitions man, as you would have to be to become “King of Kings” but Shelley’s use of past tense in that last line shows us how Ozymandias was once so great but he is now just a broken statue. This Sonnet teachers us how ambition is temporary and will only last as long as a lifetime.