The sculptor's hand and heart?

oristarA has quoted a very well known sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley. A sonnet is a poem with a fixed length of fourteen lines which follows one or another of several set rhyme-schemes. It is believed that Shelley wrote Ozymandias in competition with his friend Horace Smith, who, one month after Shelley, published one with the same subject, story, and moral point.

I remember writing in a school test in 1968 that the stone visage (face) in lines 4 and 5 has an arrogant frown and wrinkled lip, and a sneer, visible signs of passions (feelings), which have survived (outlived) both the sculptor, whose hand mocked them by stamping them so well on the statue, and the pharaoh whose heart felt them in the first place. I passed the test.

Thank you.

A bit of ambiguous in grammar.

I should have written...

(feelings), which have survived (outlived) both the sculptor, whose hand mocked them by stamping them so well on the statue, and the pharaoh whose heart fed them in the first place.



That is allowed in poetry.

Contrex is certainly right about that last bit. Poetry is neither obliged to be grammatically correct, nor even to make sense, for that matter.

There is also the double meaning of "mock" to be considered: this verb originally meant "to create/fashion an imitation of reality" (as in "a mockup"), as well as "to imitate" (as in "mock velvet"), before meaning "to ridicule" (especially by mimicking). In Shelley's day, the latter meaning was predominant (as seen in Shakespeare or the King James bible), but in the specific context of "the hand that mock'd them", we can read both "the hand that crafted them" and "the hand that ridiculed them".