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Ozymandias Summary & Analysis
by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Ozymandias Summary & Analysis
by Percy Bysshe Shelley

  • Intro
  • Summary
  • Themes
  • Line-by-Line
    Explanations
  • Symbols
  • Poetic
    Devices
  • Vocabulary &
    References
  • Form, Meter, &
    Rhyme Scheme
  • Speaker
  • Setting
  • Context
  • Resources
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The Full Text of “Ozymandias”

1I met a traveller from an antique land,

2Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

3Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

4Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

5And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

6Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

7Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

8The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

9And on the pedestal, these words appear:

10My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

11Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

12Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

13Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

14The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

  • “Ozymandias” Introduction

    • “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

    • Theme The Transience of Power

      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.”

    • Theme The Power of Art

      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.

    • Theme Man Versus Nature

      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.

  • Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Ozymandias”

    • Lines 1-2

      I met a traveller from an antique land,
      Who said

      The opening line and half of the poem introduce two of the poem’s speakers: the “I” of the poem who meets a traveller, and the traveller whose words make up the rest of the poem. Put another way, these lines establish a structure in which the speaker acts as a kind of frame through which the reader is exposed to what the traveller has seen. The speaker has never actually seen the land the traveller comes from, nor the statue that the traveller will go on to describe.

      The reader, then, encounters the statue through first the words of the speaker, and then also through the words of the traveller. By building such a layered structure, Shelley begins to establish the thematic importance of art in the poem and the way that art, and interpretations of art, can reverberate from one person to the next.

      It's also worth taking a few moments to consider the traveller in the poem. On the one hand, the traveller can be read as being exactly as described: a traveller coming from a journey in a land with a deep history—an ancient, or "antique," land. However, there is a second way to interpret the traveller.

      Shelley was inspired to write "Ozymandias" after reading the ancient Greek writer Diodorus Siculus’s description of a real-life statue of Ozymandias. As a result, it's possible to argue that the traveller from an ancient land who the speaker encounters actually is Siculus himself and that the meeting between the speaker and traveller actually occurs when the speaker reads Siculus’s account.

    • Lines 2-3

      —“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
      Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

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    • Lines 4-5

      Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
      And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

    • Lines 6-8

      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;

    • Lines 9-11

      And on the pedestal, these words appear:
      My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
      Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

    • Lines 12-14

      Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
      Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
      The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

  • “Ozymandias” Symbols

    • Symbol Sand

      Sand

      In the poem, sand is a symbol of nature’s power and also of time itself. The sand has eroded and buried the statue and all of Ozymandias’s works, a reminder that nature can destroy all human achievements, no matter how substantial. Because it destroyed the statue over time, and because of the idea of sand in an hourglass, sand also represents time itself, which has similarly worn down and eventually buried Ozymandias's empire.

    • Symbol The Statue

      The Statue

      The statue of Ozymandias has a few different symbolic meanings. First, it is a physical representation of the might of human political institutions, such as Ozymandias’s empire; this is the symbolic purpose for which Ozymandias himself had the statue built. However, because the statue has fallen into disrepair, it also holds a symbolic meaning that Ozymandias didn't intend: it represents how comparatively fragile human political institutions actually are in the face of both time and nature’s might.

      The statue also symbolizes the power of art. Through the sculptor's skill, the statue captures and preserves the "passions" of its subject by stamping them on "lifeless" rock. And the statue also symbolizes the way that art can have power beyond the intentions of even those who commission it. While Ozymandias saw the statue as a way to forever capture his power and magnificence, the poem hints that the statue so thoroughly reveals Ozymandias's haughty cruelty that it also serves to mock him. While Ozymandias's great works have been destroyed and disappeared by nature and time, art in the form of the stature endures, keeping Ozymandias's memory alive (albeit not in entirely the ways he would have wanted).

      It is also possible to interpret the statue in a third way. Because Ozymandias is clearly a tyrant, the fact that the statue has become a "wreck" hints that the statue might symbolically represent the speaker of the poem's hope and belief that tyranny will always crumble, which also happened to be one of Shelley’s own personal political passions.

  • “Ozymandias” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

    • Enjambment

      Shelley uses enjambment, which involves a string of words stretching across the boundary of the end of one line into the beginning of the next, to have his lines enact the stretching of time or sand that his words describe.

      This use of enjambment occurs first in line two, when describing the statue’s legs that still stand despite the passage of time: the fact that the content of the line stretches to the next mirrors the way that the legs themselves have also endured through time.

      Shelley’s enjambment of line 6 stretches the phrase about Ozymandias’s "passions" being preserved in his stature all the way into line 7; this stretching of the flow of the text across two lines again seems to mirror the way that the sculpture has allowed Ozymandias's passions to similarly survive.

      The poem also uses enjambment to end the poem, in lines 12 and 13. Once again this use of enjambment seems to support the idea of vastness and the passage of time. These lines describe not the survival of a human structure, such as the statue, through time, but rather the "boundless" desert that has swallowed up all remnants of Ozymandias's empire other than the stature.

      It's also worth noting that lines 12 and 13 are the only two consecutive enjambed lines in the poem—which suggests that the endurance of the desert is even more powerful than the endurance of any human artifact, and will in the end wear all traces of humanity away.

    • Caesura

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    • Alliteration

    • Irony

  • “Ozymandias” Vocabulary

    Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

    • Antique
    • Trunkless
    • Visage
    • Passions
    • Stamped
    • Mocked
    • Pedestal
    • Ozymandias
    • Remains
    Antique

    • The traveller comes from an “antique” land, which implies that his nation is ancient in the sense that it has a deep connection to the past, or perhaps even that its past outweighs its present.

      However, the word "antique" in the poem also has a metatextual connotation: Shelley’s poem was inspired by the ancient Greek writer Diodorus Siculus’s account of a real-life destroyed statue of Ozymandias, and the poem even paraphrases Siculus's account in lines 10 and 11. As a result, the traveller from an "ancient" land could be Siculus himself (and the "meeting" between the speaker and the traveler would actually be the act of reading Siculus’s account). In this way of looking at the poem, "antique" can be seen as referring to the book containing the account, which could be described as being "antique" either because it is itself old, or because it contains ancient writings.

  • Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Ozymandias”

    • Form

      "Ozymandias" is a sonnet, and as is traditional for a sonnet the poem is made up of 14 lines of iambic pentameter (meaning each line has five iambs, poetic feet with a da-DUM rhythm). However, after fulfilling those two most basic rules of the sonnet, "Ozymandias" goes on to play with and break the form.

      The poem does this in a few ways. First, it plays with rhyme scheme by generally, but not completely, following the scheme of a famous type of sonnet called a Shakespearean sonnet.

      In addition, while the poem's rhyme scheme is mostly that of a Shakespearean sonnet, its structure is more similar to that of another type of sonnet called a Petrarchan sonnet. More specifically, the poem uses the Petrarchan structure of having an eight-line octave followed by a six-line sestet:

      • Octave: Lines 1-8 of the poem focus on the statue.
      • Sestet: Lines 9-14 of the poem focus on the pedestal and surroundings.

      The poem, then, invokes two of the most prominent types of sonnet—Shakespearean and Petrarchan—but then breaks both types by refusing to follow the full conventions of either one. This "breaking" of the poetic conventions that it references can be read as an echo of the broken work of art—the statue—that "Ozymandias" describes.

    • Meter

      As is typical for a sonnet, the meter of "Ozymandias" is generally iambic pentameter, in which lines are 10 syllables long with an alternating unstressed-stressed pattern. For instance, line 9 of the poem features perfect iambic pentameter:

      And on | the ped- | estal, | these words | appear:

      However, the meter of the poem also has several moments of irregularity that it uses to create particular effects. For instance, in line 2, there is a slight spondee (stressed-stressed) on “two vast” that emphasizes the immensity of the statue’s legs:

      Who said | —“Two vast | and trunk- | less legs | of stone

      Similarly, the third line begins not with the expected iamb but with a trochee (stressed-unstressed) before returning to iambs for the rest of the line:

      Stand in | the des- | ert. . . . Near | them, on | the sand,

      The trochee puts the stress on "stand," emphasizing the strange sight of these two legs (and nothing else) sticking up out of the flat desert.

      In line 7, Shelley includes a caesura in the form of a comma, and then emphasizes the pause from the comma by changing the meter: “stamped on” is trochaic, not iambic.

      Which yet | survive, | stamped on | these life- | less things,

      The caesura and break in the metrical pattern serve to emphasize the "stamp," which in turn highlights the way that the sculptor's artistic talent permanently captures the traits of Ozymandias such that they have endured through time when everything else that Ozymandias created has disappeared. (It also hints that Shelley believes that his own artistic talent, which is exemplified in his use of the caesura and changed meter, also can create an enduring work of art.)

      In lines 10 and 11, the poem's play with meter gets a bit more extreme.

      My name | is Oz- | yman- | dias, King | of Kings;
      Look on | my Works, | ye Might- | y, and | despair!

      The best way to look at the meter of line 10 is probably to read the "dias" in Ozymandias as a single syllable (though of course it isn't). Doing so makes that line iambic pentameter in theory, but in practice the fact that "dias" truly is two syllables elongates the line in odd ways. The metrical oddities then continue in line 11, too, since “Look on” is trochaic (or, to some readers' ears, might sound like a spondee: "Look on"), as is the foot made up of the "y" in "mighty" followed by the "and."

      Rather than being smooth, the meter of these lines is spiky. This spikiness, in the only lines of the poem that quote Ozymandias directly, makes them stand out against the more regular meter of the rest of the poem.

      This fits with Ozymandias's speech in two ways:

      • First, it shows how Ozymandias saw himself as standing above and separate from the rest of the world.
      • Second, it echoes the way that only the legs of Ozymandias's statue now spike up from the otherwise flat, regular sands of the desert. Ozymandias may have stood out for a while, but nature and time have ground him back down.

      Overall, it'd possible to argue that the shifting meter in the poem has a more general thematic purpose: that it makes the poem feel as “broken” as the statue, while at the same time showing Shelley's skill to be at least the equal of the sculptor.

    • Rhyme Scheme

      "Ozymandias" is a sonnet, and sonnets have strict rules when it comes to their rhyme schemes. However, Shelley deliberately broke those rules when writing the poem. More specifically, the poem largely follows the rhyme scheme of a Shakespearean sonnet, which traditionally follows the pattern of ABABCDCDEFEFGG: six sets alternating rhymes braided together, followed then a rhyming couplet at the end.

      "Ozymandias" mostly follows this pattern, but introduces three important deviations:

      • An extra A rhyme inserted into line 5
      • An extra E rhyme inserted into line 9
      • No concluding couplet

      The result is an entirely non-standard sonnet rhyme scheme of ABABACDCEDEFEF.

      Note also that the poem plays with its rhymes in another way: a number of its rhymes are actually slant rhymes (“stone” and “frown” in lines 2 and 4, "read" and "fed" in lines 6 and 8, and “appear” and “despair” in lines 9 and 11).

      These changes to the traditional rhyme scheme heighten the similarities between the poem and the statue that it describes: both are works of art that appear to be broken and missing pieces, and both still endure despite the passing of time.

  • “Ozymandias” Speaker

    • The poem's primary speaker is anonymous and genderless, and all Shelley tells us about them is that they "met a traveller from an antique land." The poem pointedly does not include details about what this speaker thinks about the traveller, about Ozymandias, or about the destruction of Ozymandias's works. In fact, the speaker seems to primarily serve a function of distancing the reader from what is being told, as the speaker is relating a story told to him or her by the traveller.

      This traveller, the poem's second speaker, is likewise anonymous and genderless (although statistically, their extensive travels to the middle of isolated deserts would make it likely they were male, as women were strongly discouraged from being adventurers or making any sort of perilous journey when Shelley wrote the poem).

      Some readings of the poem speculate that the "traveller" is actually the ancient Greek writer Diodorus Siculus, whose description of a statue of Ozymandias inspired Shelley to write his poem. In this interpretation, the "meeting" of the speaker and the "traveller" occurs through the act of the speaker reading Siculus's words.

      Regardless, the traveller seems interested in art and the way it functions but spends even more time describing the personality of the poem's third speaker: Ozymandias himself, through his words on the pedestal. Of all three speakers, the poem provides the most details about Ozymandias: he announces himself as a king whose concerns focus on his own greatness, power, and legacy.

  • “Ozymandias” Setting

    • “Ozymandias” has two primary settings:

      • The first is an unspecified time and place—most likely, early 19th-century England when the poem was written—where the speaker and the traveller meet.
      • The second is the recent past in Egypt, where the traveller sees a ruined statue of Ozymandias in the desert.

      The poem only spends a line and a half on the first setting, devoting the remaining twelve and a half lines to the desert scene: by focusing on nature and the crumbling remnants of a statue, the poem shows how nature can destroy everything human-made, from political systems to statues, and yet how art, even when broken, can provide a kind of artistic immortality.

      It's worth noting that if one subscribes to the theory that the traveller to whom the speaker refers is actually Diodorus Siculus, an ancient Greek writer whose description of an actual destroyed statue inspired Shelley's poem, then the settings of the poem subtly shift. In this case, the first setting is any location in which the speaker can "meet" Siculus (i.e. by reading Siculus's passage in a book), while the second setting is still the desert in Egypt, but it is Egypt not during Shelley's time but rather during the time of the ancient Greeks.

  • Literary and Historical Context of “Ozymandias”

      Literary Context

      Shelley was a Romantic poet, and as such, was very interested in the sublime power of nature, art, and the individual. This poem addresses those concerns on a grand scale. Shelley was also a political writer. Several years after the publication of “Ozymandias,” he published a pamphlet entitled "A Philosophical View of Reform" in which he called for an end to tyranny and discussed the history of empires crumbling over time. “Ozymandias” displays many of Shelley's concerns, both in terms of its depiction of man versus nature and its apparent politics.

      “Ozymandias” has several literary predecessors and contemporaries. Shelley and his friend and fellow writer Horace Smith challenged each other to write about Ozymandias and his destroyed statue after reading about the statue in a description written by the ancient Greek writer Diodorus Siculus. Siculus described the pedestal of the real-life statue as containing an inscription that read "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, then, is a re-telling of an already-told story, and one can argue that in retelling the story in his poem Shelley is actually taking up Ozymandias's challenge—that in writing "Ozymandias" Shelley sought to surpass Ozymandias's works.

      Historical Context

      The historical Ozymandias’s legacy was not actually entirely dead when Shelley wrote this poem. In fact, Shelley may have been inspired to write this poem by newspaper reports that the British Museum had acquired the large head of an Egyptian statue: a statue that later turned out to be of Ramses II, also known by his Greek name, Ozymandias. This fragment of a sculpture of Ozymandias produced not despair at the futility of human achievements, but rather excitement, enthusiasm, and ultimately, preservation in a museum, where the artifact would be protected from the elements and, as much as possible, from time itself.

      Some critics believe that the poem is partly—though certainly not entirely—a response to the rise and fall of Emperor Napoleon, in France. In this reading, the poem serves as a warning to those who seek political and military power, that they will fall be eventually be forgotten, just as Ozymandias was.

  • More “Ozymandias” Resources

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