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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.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
IN HER "NATURAL AND NATIONAL MONUMENTS FELICIA HEMANS'S 'THE Image in Lava': A Note," Isobel Armstrong remarks that Hemans's poem is "clearly in dialogue" with Shelley's "Ozymandias" by virtue of "having its 'monuments' belong to dust and sand."1 Among her many astute observations about the two poems, Armstrong notes the complexity of Shelley's phrase "Nothing beside remains," as the word "remains" "swings between noun and verb," at once suggesting an absence or lack as well as the broken remnants that continue to exist.2 To take the idea even further, this presentation of the crumbling colossus recreates it as a form of remains, a corpse left behind as the only marker of a spirit long departed from the nowlifeless physical site; it is a partially failed and still failing attempt at immortality through materiality. The ruined monument becomes a strangely liminal art object, ambiguously isolated, without historical context, and therefore open to the free musings of poets. This liminality creates a pervading sense of loss that allows the poem to hover somewhere between the traditions of ekphrasis and elegy, and it is this intermingling of genres that Felicia Hemans adopts and adapts for even greater uses in her own poetry.
Discussing the elegies of Felicia Hemans, Michael T. Williamson observes that "Hemans writes elegiac poems that lament the waste of women's psychic and imaginative energy on a world tainted by male death, deplore the absence of any commemorative interest in the histories of women, and represent dramatically disfiguring subject positions for women mourners."3 While Williamson is speaking of Hemans's actual elegies, this observation fits well with her ekphrastic poetry, which is also haunted by comparable feelings of loss and mourning. Hemans's ekphrases parallel and intermix with her elegies in many ways; however, while it is true that the "engagement with the aftermath of death insistently shifts our attention away from the significance (or symbolic potency) of the dead and toward the living figure of the woman mourner" in her elegies,4 the similar effect in Hemans's ekphrastic poetry has gone mostly unnoticed. The reexamination of Hemans's ekphrastic poetry...