Ozymandias

Summary

Ozymandias is a fourteen-line sonnet about a ruined statue of an Egyptian king in the desert, and it has become the best-known English poem on the vanity of earthly power. Shelley wrote it in late 1817, in a friendly sonnet-writing contest with his friend Horace Smith on the same subject, and Leigh Hunt printed it in The Examiner on 11 January 1818. The name Ozymandias is the Greek form, recorded by the historian Diodorus Siculus, of a royal name of Ramesses II, the long-reigning pharaoh of the thirteenth century BC. The poem is told at two removes. The speaker reports what a traveller from an antique land told him: two huge legs of stone, without a trunk, still stand in the desert. Nearby, half sunk in the sand, lies a shattered face. Its frown, wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command show that the sculptor read the king's passions well; those passions survive, stamped on lifeless stone, outlasting both the hand of the artist who mocked them and the heart of the king that fed them. On the pedestal are carved the king's words, in which he names himself king of kings and commands the mighty to look on his works and despair. Shelley then turns the inscription against its author with a bare statement: nothing beside remains. Around the colossal wreck, the lone and level sands stretch away to the horizon. The boast meant to make rival kings despair of matching him now invites despair of a different kind, at the emptiness of all such ambition. The sonnet bends the usual forms, with a rhyme scheme that belongs neither to the Italian nor to the English model, and its frame of voices (speaker, traveller, sculptor, king) layers report on report. Its ironies of time, art, and tyranny made it a favorite of anthologies and a touchstone whenever empires and monuments fall.

Top Lessons

• Pride undone by time

  The king's inscription meant that no ruler could ever equal his works. Time has turned the same words into a warning that all such works perish. The poem lets the empty desert, rather than a moralizing narrator, deliver the verdict.

• Art outlasts its subject and its maker

  What survives is not the king's empire but the sculptor's reading of his character. The artist's hand mocked, meaning both imitated and scorned, the passions it carved. The poem itself repeats the act, preserving the king only as an emblem of arrogance.

• Testimony at second hand

  The speaker never sees the statue; he reports a traveller who reports a sculptor who recorded a king. Each layer distances the reader from Ozymandias, so that the mighty pharaoh reaches us as a rumor from the sand.

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