It’s All Wet

In “The Flow of the River,” Loren Eiseley takes the reader on a symbolic adventure exploring man and nature. Eiseley relates two of his experiences in the outdoors: floating down the Platte River on his back and his short relationship with a talking catfish found frozen in the river. As Eiseley floats down the Platte, he ponders the natural beauty around him and the connection of the natural world and humans that water creates. A frozen catfish, assumed dead, becomes Eiseley’s ultimate metaphor for the correlation of man and nature. Through these experiences with elements of water, Eiseley explores the character of man and nature. Eiseley’s use of symbolism demonstrates that through water, man and nature are the same.

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Surviving the Test of Time

In just fourteen short lines, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” eloquently captures a moment in time and history. Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792-1822, was born into wealth, educated at Eton and Oxford, traveled widely throughout Europe, wrote extensively, and died regrettably young in a boating accident (Wikipedia.org). “Ozymandias”, written in 1818, is believed to have been written “in competition with his friend Horace Smith, as Smith published a sonnet a month after Shelley's which takes the same subject and makes the same moral point” (Wikipedia.org). “Ozymandias” is not considered Shelley’s best work by experts, but has become his most well-known as it has been his most anthologized (Sparknotes.com). The obvious moral of “Ozymandias” is simple: the mighty and powerful are subject to, and victims of, the inevitable forgetfulness of time and history. Less obvious but far more profound is the idea that the work of the artistsans is what gains the respect and honor of history. Through use of theme, structure and word choice, Shelley’s “Ozymandias” shows that it is not the work of the mighty and powerful that stands the test of time, but the work of the artists.