두 편의 낭만주의 소네트에 나타난 고대의 “폐허”

Abstract

This paper aims at examining the image of ancient ruins in Romantic poetry by investigating two sonnets that contain self-conscious reflections on “fragments.” John Keats’s “On seeing the Elgin Marbles for the first time” and Percy Bysshe Shelley's “Ozymandias” both convey romantic ideas about the past and the present, the part and the whole, and mortality and immortality. In both poems, the Elgin Marbles and the sculpture of Ozymandias are presented as artworks embodying perfection in their own days, but they only remain in fractured ruins at the time when the poets compose these sonnets. The poetic speakers in both sonnets attempt to reconstruct the meaning of these ruins through communicative interactions with the shattered artworks transferred from the past. In “On seeing the Elgin Marbles for the first time,” the speaker initially experiences highly melancholy feelings upon his encounter with the gigantic ruins. Yet, his painful meditations on mortality and human imperfection presented in the octave turns into an aesthetic experience of “the sublime” in the sestet. By exemplifying a successful way of coming to terms with the fragmented artwork of the past, Keats expresses his own longing for an ideal reader who can ultimately complete unfinished poetic texts. In the octave of “Ozymandias,” Shelley deploys multiple speakers who read and interpret the historical figure of Ozymandias in their own ways. Then, these conflicting comments on the central figure of this poem open for the reader a new way of perceiving Ozymandias in her own terms. In the sestet, where the speaker’s presence is largely missing, the reader directly hears Ozymandias’s commanding voices, which are set in sharp contrast to the “lone and level sands” that deconstruct the emperor's self-aggrandizing words. These two poems tactfully utilize the sonnet form in converting the “ruins” from the past into the “fragments” for the future. Through the invocation of future readers who can participate in the meaning process, these sonnets display the romantic aspiration toward open-ended vision and unrestrained imagination.