Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
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. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

About the poem:

“Ozymandias” is a sonnet written by the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley wrote
“Ozymandias” in 1817 as part of a poetry contest with a friend and had it published in The Examiner in
1818 under the pen name Glirastes. The title “Ozymandias” refers to an alternate name of the ancient
Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II. In the poem, Shelley describes a crumbling statue of Ozymandias as a way
to portray the transience of political power and to praise art’s ability to preserve the past. Although the
poem is a 14-line sonnet, it breaks from the typical sonnet tradition in both its form and rhyme scheme, a
tactic that reflects Shelley’s interest in challenging conventions, both political and poetic.

Ozymandias” Summary
 The speaker of the poem meets a traveller who came from an ancient land. The traveller
describes two large stone legs of a statue, which lack a torso to connect them and which
stand upright in the desert. Near the legs, half-buried in sand, is the broken face of the
statue. The statue's facial expression—a frown and a wrinkled lip—form a commanding,
haughty sneer. The expression shows that the sculptor understood the emotions of the
person the statue is based on, and now those emotions live on, carved forever on
inanimate stone. In making the face, the sculptor’s skilled hands mocked up a perfect
recreation of those feelings and of the heart that fed those feelings (and, in the process, so
perfectly conveyed the subject’s cruelty that the statue itself seems to be mocking its
subject). The traveller next describes the words inscribed on the pedestal of the statue,
which say: "My name is Ozymandias, the King who rules over even other Kings. Behold
what I have built, all you who think of yourselves as powerful, and despair at the
 magnificence and superiority of my accomplishments." There is nothing else in the
area. Surrounding the remnants of the large statue is a never-ending and barren desert,
with empty and flat sands stretching into the distance.

Ozymandias” Themes
 The Transience of Power
One of Shelley’s most famous works, “Ozymandias” describes the ruins of an ancient
king’s statue in a foreign desert. All that remains of the statue are two “vast” stone legs
standing upright and a head half-buried in sand, along with a boastful inscription
describing the ruler as the “king of kings” whose mighty achievements invoke awe and
despair in all who behold them. The inscription stands in ironic contrast to the decrepit
reality of the statue, however, underscoring the ultimate transience of political power.
The poem implicitly critiques such power through its suggestion that both great rulers
and their kingdoms will fall to the sands of time.

In the poem, the speaker relates a story a traveler told him about the ruins of a “colossal
wreck” of a sculpture whose decaying physical state mirrors the dissolution of its
subject’s—Ozymandias’s—power. Only two upright legs, a face, and a pedestal remain
of Ozymandias’s original statue, and even these individual parts of the statue are not in
great shape: the face, for instance, is “shattered." Clearly, time hasn’t been kind to this
statue, whose pitiful state undercuts the bold assertion of its inscription. The fact that
even this “king of kings” lies decaying in a distant desert suggests that no amount of
power can withstand the merciless and unceasing passage of time.

The speaker goes on to explain that time not only destroyed this statue, it also essentially
erased the entire kingdom the statue was built to overlook. The speaker immediately
follows the king’s declaration found on the pedestal of the statue—“Look upon my
works, ye Mighty, and despair!”—with the line “Nothing beside remains.” Such a savage
contradiction makes the king’s prideful dare almost comically naïve.

Ozymandias had believed that while he himself would die, he would leave a lasting and
intimidating legacy through everything he built. Yet his words are ultimately empty, as
everything he built has crumbled. The people and places he ruled over are gone, leaving
 only an abandoned desert whose “lone and level sands” imply that there's not even a trace
of the kingdom’s former glory to be found. The pedestal’s claim that onlookers should
despair at Ozymandias’s works thus takes on a new and ironic meaning: one despairs not
at Ozymandias’s power, but at how powerless time and decay make everyone.

The speaker also uses the specific example of Ozymandias to make a broader
pronouncement about the ephemeral nature of power and, in turn, to implicitly critique
tyranny. The speaker evokes the image of a cruel leader; Ozymandias wears a “frown”
along with the “sneer of cold command." That such “passions” are now recorded only on
“lifeless things” (i.e., the statue) is a clear rebuke of such a ruler, and suggests that the
speaker believes such tyranny now only exists on the face of a dead and crumbling piece
of stone.

The poem's depiction of the destruction of Ozymandias and his tyranny isn’t entirely
fictional: Ozymandias is the Greek name for the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II, who
dramatically expanded Egypt’s empire and who had several statues of himself built
throughout Egypt. In fact, the Ancient Greek writer Diodorus Siculus reported the
following inscription on the base of one of Ozymandias’s statues: "King of Kings am I,
Ozymandias. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one
of my works." By alluding to an actual ancient empire, and an actual king, the poem
reminds readers that history is full of the rises and falls of empires. No power is
permanent, regardless of how omnipotent a ruler believes himself to be. Even the “king
of kings” may one day be a forgotten relic of an “antique land.”

The Power of Art

“Ozymandias” famously describes a ruined statue of an ancient king in an empty desert.
Although the king’s statue boastfully commands onlookers to “Look on my Works, ye Mighty,
and despair,” there are no works left to examine: the king’s cities, empire, and power have all
disappeared over time. Yet even as the poem insists that “nothing beside” the shattered statue
and its pedestal remains, there is one thing that actually has withstood the centuries: art. The
skillful rendering of the statue itself and the words carved alongside it have survived long after
Ozymandias and his kingdom turned to dust, and through this Shelley’s poem positions art as
perhaps the most enduring tool in preserving humanity’s legacy.

Although the statue is a “wreck” in a state of “decay,” its individual pieces show the skill of the
sculptor and preserve the story of Ozymandias. The face is “shattered,” leaving only a mouth and
nose above the desert sand, but the “frown,” “wrinkled lip,” and “sneer” clearly show
Ozymandias’s “passions” (that is, his pride, tyranny, and disdain for others). The fragments
interpret and preserve the king’s personality and show onlookers throughout history what sort of
a man and leader Ozymandias truly was.

These fragments, then, are examples of art’s unique ability to capture and relate an individual’s
character even after their death. In fact, the poem explicitly emphasizes art’s ability to bring
personalities to life: the speaker explains that Ozymandias’s “passions” “yet survive” on the
broken statue despite being carved on “lifeless” stone. Ozymandias may be dead, yet, thanks to
the sculptor who “read” those “passions” and “mocked,” or made an artistic reproduction of
them, his personality and emotions live.

In addition to highlighting the sculptor’s artistic skill, Shelley’s poem also elevates the act of
writing through its focus on the inscription of the statue’s pedestal. The pedestal preserves
Ozymandias’ identity even more explicitly than the statue itself. The inscription reveals his
name, his status as royalty (“King of Kings”), and his command for “Mighty” onlookers to
“despair” at his superiority and strength. His words are thus a lasting testament to his hubris, yet
it is notably only the words themselves—rather than the threat behind them—that survive.
Without this inscription, none would know Ozymandias’s name nor the irony of his final
proclamation.

In other words, his legacy and its failure only exist because a work of art—specifically, a written
work—preserved them. The poem therefore presents art as a means to immortality; while
everything else disappears, art, even when broken and half-buried in sand, can carry humanity’s
legacy.

This power of art is reflected by the composition of the poem itself. Shelley was aware that the
ancient Greek writer Diodorus Siculus had described a statue of the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II
and had transcribed the inscription on its pedestal as "King of Kings am I, Ozymandias. If
anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works." Shelley’s
poem exists solely because of Siculus’s description: Shelley and his friend and fellow writer
Horace Smith had challenged each other to a friendly competition over who could write the best
poem inspired by Siculus's description. This poem was Shelley’s entry, and it became by far the
more famous of the two. Like Siculus’ description of the statue, this poem keeps Ozymandias’s
story and words alive for subsequent generations.

The very composition of this poem, then, dramatizes the power of art: art can preserve people,
objects, cities, and empires, giving them a sort of immortality, and letting future generations
“look on [past] works” not with despair, but with wonder.

Man Versus Nature

As a Romantic poet, Shelley was deeply respectful of nature and skeptical of humanity’s
attempts to dominate it. Fittingly, his “Ozymandias” is not simply a warning about the transience
of political power, but also an assertion of humanity’s impotence compared to the natural world.
The statue the poem describes has very likely become a “colossal Wreck” precisely because of
the relentless forces of sand and wind erosion in the desert. This combined with the fact that
“lone and level sands” have taken over everything that once surrounded the statue suggests
nature as an unstoppable force to which human beings are ultimately subservient.

Shelley’s imagery suggests a natural world whose might is far greater than that of humankind.
The statue is notably found in a desert, a landscape hostile towards life. That the statue is
“trunkless” suggests sandstorms eroded the torso or buried it entirely, while the face being
“shattered” implies humanity’s relative weakness: even the destruction of a hulking piece of
stone is nothing for nature.

The fact that the remains of the statute are “half sunk” under the sand, meanwhile, evokes a kind
of burial. In fact, the statement “nothing beside remains” can be read as casting the fragments of
the statue as the “remains” of a corpse. The encroaching sand described in the poem suggests
that nature has steadily overtaken a once great civilization and buried it, just as nature will one
day reclaim everything humanity has built, and every individual human as well.
The desert, not Ozymandias, is thus the most powerful tyrant in Shelley’s poem. It is
“boundless” and “stretch[es] far away” as though it has conquered everything the eye can see,
just as it has conquered Ozymandias’s statue. Ozymandias may be the king of kings, but even
kings can be toppled by mere grains of sand.