Analyzation of Document 1- Ozymandias by Percy Shelley

OZYMANDIAS BY P. SHELLEY
I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said--"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert....Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away."

ANALYZATION OF THE POEM
In the poem, one can markedly notice the despair and loss of hope that many Romanticists feel. It is found in the words; words like "vast" and "colossal Wreck" along with the lines "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone/ Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,/ Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies..." begin to exude emotion of isolation and desolation. It was not hard to feel those emotions during this time of rapid industrialization and scientific rationality.
Machines make work easier. Ask any science teacher, and they will tell you that the purpose of a tool or machine is to make work easier. With the boom of technological advances, producing manufactured goods became easy and cheap. No longer were skilled workers needed to make a product. Machines and lines of assembly people who were not necessairily skilled put together a product. Eventually machines took the place of those people who were running the machines. It sort of takes away the value of hard work and skills to do a particular job. The knowledge that a machine can do better work even while producing is belittling, taking away humans' natural notion of being on top.
The Rationalist movement aimed to make things clinical and methodized; its goal was to know what the world around us was, to gather the knowledge of the universe and to completely know what it was. Sad to say, it took the emotion out of everything, making it lifeless; it is not unlike man going to the moon.
Humans have always looked with wonder and longing at that particular celestial body, finding inspiration with what it could be and the limitless possiblities of what was on it. "Man on the moon", "Woman in the sky", and "Cheese ball" are just a few names that many over the centuries have referred to it as. Yet, the day that man went to the moon and walked its rocky plains and craters, the moon became nothing more than a barren body that encircles us.
Returning to the Romantics, this sudden void of emotion along with the technological development of the day made for a very despairing and morbid group. As a reaction, Shelley and other Romantic co-conspirators vowed to feel more and to enjoy the natural pleasures of life.