Framing the sonnet as a story told to the speaker by “a traveller from an antique land” enables Shelley to add another level of obscurity to Ozymandias’s position with regard to the reader-rather It is Shelley’s brilliant poetic rendering of the story, and not the subject of the story itself, which makes the poem so memorable.
It is significant that all that remains of Ozymandias is a work of art and a group of words as Shakespeare does in the sonnets, Shelley demonstrates that art and language long outlast the other legacies of power. But Ozymandias symbolizes not only political power-the statue can be a metaphor for the pride and hubris of all of humanity, in any of its manifestations. Ozymandias is first and foremost a metaphor for the ephemeral nature of political power, and in that sense the poem is Shelley’s most outstanding political sonnet, trading the specific rage of a poem like “England in 1819” for the crushing impersonal metaphor of the statue. The ruined statue is now merely a monument to one man’s hubris, and a powerful statement about the insignificance of human beings to the passage of time. The once-great king’s proud boast has been ironically disproved Ozymandias’s works have crumbled and disappeared, his civilization is gone, all has been turned to dust by the impersonal, indiscriminate, destructive power of history. Essentially it is devoted to a single metaphor: the shattered, ruined statue in the desert wasteland, with its arrogant, passionate face and monomaniacal inscription (“Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”). Still, “Ozymandias” is a masterful sonnet. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.ĭetailed Analysis of the Poem: This sonnet composed in 1817 is probably Shelley’s most famous and most anthologized poem-which is somewhat strange, considering that it is in many ways an atypical poem for Shelley, and that it touches little upon the most important themes in his oeuvre at large (beauty, expression, love, imagination). 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 upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Nothing beside remains.
Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley I met a traveler from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert.
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