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Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe 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.”


INTRODUCTION -

Ozymandias is a famous poem by the English Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley. The poem was written in 1817 but published a year later in 1818 in The Examiner. The poem matches the structure of a Petrarchan sonnet i.e. its fourteen lines have been divide into an octave and a sestet. However, the rhyme scheme of the poem matches that of an Elizabethan sonnet - ABABCDCDEFEFGG. The poem is written in iambic pentameter. The title of “Ozymandias” refers to a substitute name of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh, Ramses II. Considered Shelley's most famous and most selected poem, the poet uses a collapsing statue of Ozymandias to describe the power of the political past and the power of art to conserve the past. The poem challenges readers at both poetic and political levels.


POET -

Percy Bysshe Shelley (4 August 1792 – 8 July 1822) was an English Romantic poet and one of the main figures in the second Romantic Movement. His contemporaries included famous poets like John Keats and Lord Byron. He was defined by Harold Bloom as "one of the most advanced sceptical intellects ever to write a poem." His poems define his ideas of vegetarianism and non-violence. His most famous works include Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, Ode to a Skylark, etc.

SUMMARY -

The poem starts with the speaker sharing a memory with us. He said that once he met a traveller who came from an ancient land. The traveller told him about two large stone legs of a statue, which lack a torso connected to them and stands upright in the barren desert. Near the legs lies a shattered face of the statue, half-buried in the sand. The expression on the statue's crumbling face was still noticeable though. It had a frown and wrinkled lips that made it look like he was giving a commanding sneer. The poet says that it explains that the sculptor who made the statue understood the emotions of the person on whom this statue is based. These emotions have lived on carved on these stones and survived long durations of time. The sculptor by creating this inanimate statue has mocked those feelings of pride on the face of the statue and the heart that held those feelings. In other ways, we can say that he has mocked the real man on whom the statue was made.

Next, the traveller tells the poet that near the statue stood a pedestal which was broken just like the statue, but it read a few words saying "My name is Ozymandias, the King who rules over other Kings. Have a look at my kingdom and my works, all of you who consider yourselves mighty. But after looking at my greatness you are going to feel despair." The traveller further tells the poet that nothing lies beside the statue for us to look at. Everything is destroyed and dead. The statue is surrounded by an unending and barren desert with empty and flat sands stretching into the distance.

THEMES -

  • The power of art - The poem describes a ruined statue of an ancient king in an empty desert. The skilled 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 the poem positions art as perhaps the most surviving tool in preserving the human legacy.
  • The transitoriness of power - The statue king, Ozymandias boasts himself to be the king of kings. The inscription stands in ironic contrast to the frail reality of the statue, however, underlining the final fugitiveness of political power. The poem critiques such power through its suggestion that both great rulers and their kingdoms will fall to the sands of time.

END -

“Ozymandias” is a masterful sonnet. It is devoted to the state of the destroyed, ruined statue in the desert, with its domineering, intense face and monomaniacal inscription. Ozymandias’s works have crumbled and disappeared, his civilization is gone, all have been turned to dust. The poem is a great example of the saying that times destroy everything. Thus, all pride and vanity are useless.

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