Ozymandias
By P.B 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."
— Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias"
What is it about ?
- Explores the fate of history and the ravages of time: even the greatest men and the empires they forge are impermanent, their
legacies fated to decay into oblivion.
- Imagines a meeting between the narrator and a 'traveller' who describes a ruined statue he - or she - saw in the middle of a desert
somewhere.
- The description of the statue is a meditation on the fragility of human power and on the effects of time.
Summary
speaker 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 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—from 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.
Form
rhyme scheme:
-unusual for a sonnet of this era
-Doesnt fit a conventional Petrarchan pattern, but instead interlinks the octave with the sestet by gradually replacing old rhymes
with new ones in the form ABABACDCEDEFEF.
● not a Shakespearean sonnet, nor a Petrarchan
first part sets up the frame narrative and then describes the statue
second part ironically relates the king's words and adds the final description of the desert setting.
, three voices: the original "I", the traveller and the voice of Ozymandias himself.
LINES 1-2:
- opening line + half of the poem introduces 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- traveller may 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.
LINES 2-3
- The traveller’s description of the “vast” legs emphasizes the large proportions of the statue, and by extension the might
and power of whoever built the statue
- legs still “stand” upright makes the statue seem stable and immovable, as though it has firmly planted its feet.
- However, this stability is at odds with the fact that the statue is actually in ruins: it is “trunkless,” or missing its torso. The
legs stand alone, sticking up strangely from the desert.
- The poem then emphasizes the brokenness of the statue through what might be called a purposeful vagueness: note how
the third line ends with the words "Near them, on the sand," without actually describing what is near the legs.
LINES 2-3
- punctuation marks break up the lines into fragments, both visually and aurally, and these fragments are reminiscent of
the fragments of the statue itself.
- The ellipsis: (....) is reminiscent of the fragments of the statue that are spread out on the sand.
- two caesuras mean that the description of the legs is literally cut off from the rest of the description, just as the legs
themselves are cut off and "trunkless."
The structure of the poem mirrors and enhances the meaning of its words.
LINES 4-5
- the face of the statue has been damaged by time and nature.
- "half sunk" in sand. It's been "shattered." And yet, even so, the parts of the face that remain are enough to convey
realistic facial expressions and, therefore, a sense of the statue's subject.
- statue "frowns," "sneers," and has a "wrinkled lip," an expression often connected to disgust or scorn.
- Line 5 ends on the words "cold command," which emphasizes that the statue is of someone who commanded, a ruler or
tyrant.
- “c” alliteration in “cold command” gives the line a hard, militaristic feel, suggesting Ozymandias's iron rule.
