Ozymandias

Ozymandias

I met a traveler 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.”

“Ozymandias” is a sonnet composed by the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and named for its subject, with the Greek name of the Egyptian king Ramses II, who died in 1234 b.c.e. The poem follows the traditional structure of the fourteen-line Italian sonnet, featuring an opening octave, or set of eight lines, that presents a conflict or dilemma, followed by a sestet, or set of six lines, that offers some resolution or commentary upon the proposition introduced in the octave.

The poem is conventionally written in iambic pentameter (that is, ten syllables per line of coupled unstressed then stressed sounds), so the poem’s subject matter is framed both by the structural and metrical constraints chosen by the poet.

The first-person narrator of “Ozymandias” introduces a conversation he has chanced to have with a “traveler from an antique land” in line 1. The reader knows neither the identity of the traveler nor the circumstances wherein the poet has encountered the traveler but may assume he is a source of information about a strange and unfamiliar world.

The remaining thirteen lines of the poem quote verbatim the tale that the traveler has borne from his trek into the desert. The intrepid explorer has encountered “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone,” the vestiges of a statue in disrepair whose head lay as a “shattered visage” nearby. Despite its broken state, the “frown,” the “wrinkled lip” and “sneer of cold command” of the statue’s face bespeak its sculptor’s skill in capturing the vanity and self-importance of its subject.

The traveler remarks that the artist has “well those passions read which yet survive”—that is, those indications of the subject’s character, indelibly “stamped on lifeless things”: “the hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.”

The octave thus confronts the reader in its first movement with an ironic portrait of an ancient monarch whose fame and stature have been immortalized in a static gaze that connotes paradoxically both celebrity and dissolution. In the revelatory sestet which follows, the poet posits, through the testimony of the traveler, the fate of vainglorious men. On the pedestal, he finds written the great man’s empty boast: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,/ Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Yet “Nothing beside remains” but ruins, a “colossal Wreck, boundless and bare” against the lonely landscape of sand and cruel, penetrating sunlight. A double irony is at work; neither the great man nor the work of the artist remains in credible shape to challenge or delight the imagination of those who would encounter it. King and artisan, mover and maker, share the same destiny. The poem ends with the reader/observer’s gaze fixed upon this pathetic legacy, contemplating his own mortality.