Power: who has it, and how long it lasts

What makes a ruler powerful: an army, or what people believe about him? The army sounds like the obvious answer. In sixteen fifty-one, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued that a reputation for power is itself power, because people follow whoever seems strong. So power lives partly in other people's heads. Now three poems. Ozymandias had an empire. The Duke had a wife. Blake's Londoners had nothing at all. Three scales of power, and everyone holding it is sure it will last. What the three share underneath is the argument this video builds.

Here is the claim, before the evidence: in this cluster, power is about controlling what people believe, and every poem shows that control wearing out. Four moves prove it. Move one: power always describes itself as permanent. Ozymandias has it carved in stone: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" And Shelley puts the answer straight underneath: "Nothing beside remains." The shortest sentence sits under the longest boast, so the claim to permanence is undone in the next breath. Move two: real power does not have to explain itself. The Duke in My Last Duchess says only "I gave commands; Then all smiles stopped together." A murder becomes half a line, because nobody in the room will question him. The Duke even says why he never explains. Telling his wife in words what displeased him would cost him something: "E’en then would be some stooping; and I choose Never to stoop." An explanation would lower him, and an order does not. Before move three, a check. Here are three lines. The first: "Nothing beside remains". The second: "I gave commands". The third: "The mind-forged manacles I hear". Which of those three shows power carried by its own victims? The third, from Blake's London. Manacles made in the mind need no jailer: the people of the city hold themselves in place. That is move three: the most efficient power is the kind the victim carries for you. Blake's line is "The mind-forged manacles I hear", and nobody in London is in real chains. The second pairing makes the same move in a schoolroom. John Agard's speaker says his teachers "Bandage up me eye with me own history." "Blind me to me own identity.". Power here works by choosing what is taught. You can hear the choosing in the poem itself: "Dem tell me bout Dick Whittington and he cat But Toussaint L’Ouverture No dem never tell me bout dat". A cat from a pantomime story makes it into his lessons, and the man who led the Haitian Revolution is left out. Why does Agard's schooling count as power, when nobody in the poem gives an order? Because the schooling decides what he believes about himself. Controlling what people know is quieter than an army, and it lasts longer, until somebody checks it. And move four, where the claim lands: Imtiaz Dharker's Tissue calls every human structure something "never meant to last". The poems know it before the rulers do. Dharker even names what rulers build to last. She imagines an architect who would "let the daylight break through capitals and monoliths, through the shapes that pride can make". Dharker never mentions Ozymandias, but set them side by side: his boast on the pedestal is that kind of pride, and in Tissue the light goes straight through it.

So that is what the three poems share. Power in this cluster is not who gives the orders. It is who gets to decide what other people believe about the order of things, and every poem here shows that wearing out.

One examiner's report backs this approach: Similarly, responses that discussed the responsibilities or abuse of power, fared much better in Section B than those who stayed within the particulars of the poems in My Last Duchess, Ozymandias or London. If you are arguing about power itself, rather than retelling the Duke's story, you are already doing what that report praises. The habit is to keep every paragraph about power, with the story as evidence.

Now a practice question to plan yourself: compare how two poets show that power does not last. Three steps help. First, decide what kind of power each poem is about. Second, find the moment where that power is at its most confident. Third, find the line that undoes it. Pause and plan it: two poems, the confident moment and the undoing in each. Here is one plan. The claim: both poems show power at its most confident and then undo it, but with different forces. Ozymandias: the confident moment is the pedestal's boast, and the undoing is Nothing beside remains, delivered by time and sand. Checking Out Me History: the confident moment is the schooling's control, dem tell me, and the undoing is the speaker carving out his own identity. The ending ties them together: Shelley's power is undone by time, which nobody chooses, and Agard's by a man who chooses to check, which makes the second poem the more hopeful one. Two wrong turns to avoid. Retelling the Duke and his wife, or explaining who Ramesses the Second was, spends sentences on story instead of power. And a paragraph on the sonnet form, Shelley's fourteen-line shape, goes nowhere if it never says what the form does.

Let's pull the strand together with four questions, ending on one the video has not asked. Can you state this video's claim about power in one sentence? Power in this cluster is control of what people believe, and every poem shows it wearing out. Now the Duke: which half-line carries a murder as an order? I gave commands. The Duke never has to explain, so the order is enough. Try Blake: what kind of manacles does he hear? Mind-forged manacles: chains carried by the people they hold. One more: The Emigree's country is sick with tyrants. Is their power lasting? Not entirely. The tyrants hold the country, but they cannot hold what she remembers, so their power stops at her memory. Hobbes said power lives partly in what people believe. These poems agree, and then they show the belief giving way.

Build that power argument across two poems with no notes and you can build it yourself in the exam, so mark it with the thumb. Not yet, plan the practice question again tomorrow; second plans come faster.

Next in the chapter: The reality of conflict: what fighting does to the person doing it. Hopefully that's next in your feed, but if not, search for ScholaFly E L four oh, eighteen.

Every other video is on scholafly.com too, easy to search by video code or by keyword. Whatever you're revising, go there and have a look, or, watch the next video.