In 1818, Percy Shelley and his friend Horace Smith engaged in a competition to write a sonnet about the ruins of the Egyptian king Ozymandias. The two poems were published in The Examiner in February of that year. Smith’s sonnet swiftly faded into literary oblivion. Shelley’s, with its powerful narrative, muscular diction, and tragically human sensibility, has become one of the most respected and anthologized poems in the English language. Readers cannot easily forget Shelley’s spare, haunting images: the ruined king’s “sneer of cold command” and, all around, the desert distances where “the lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Skills: analysis, drawing inferences from text, close reading, identifying the relationship between words

About This Document

The Owl Eyes Imagery activity gives students an opportunity to practice identifying and analyzing imagery. Imagery within a text creates a sensory experience that can connect readers to a text’s setting, atmosphere, or overall aesthetic. Studying imagery will help students understand how narrators or principal characters feel. The main components of this worksheet include the following:

• A brief introduction to the text
• A handout on types of imagery with examples from classic texts
• A step-by-step guide to activity procedure
• Selected examples of imagery from the text

In completing this worksheet, students will learn to identify and analyze different kinds of imagery in order to develop close reading skills and identify the effect imagery has on their reading experience.