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".
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Critical Analysis
"As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs” (Henry David Thoreau). When Ozymandias was written in 1818 by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Egyptology was a popular “Romantic” topic of the day. Ozymandias is a fourteen-line sonnet that follows the traditional thematic and formal convention of the Romantic period. Using voice, open-ended metaphors, and irony, Shelley writes the Romantic sonnet as a commentary on the effect that history has on anyone who thinks they can outsmart time.
The poem Ozymandias, describes a man who meets a traveler. The traveler tells him of an ancient land. He describes a scene that includes an object half buried in the dry, far, and reaching sands, possibly left from centuries or millennia past. The statue is no longer complete. What does remain intact, however, are the statue’s legs and near to them, the expressive face of the statue and an inscription at the base of the statue which proclaims the timeless majesty and pride felt by whom the statue’s likeness is of, Ozymandias.[1]
The “Romantic” poetry, art, and literature of Shelley’s day reflect a culture that is looking to escape the trials of their time. The “French Revolution” and “American Revolution” have depressed the nations from continent to continent. The “Industrial Revolution” has dirtied cities and overcrowded them. Napoleon is the self proclaimed emperor of France and has just been involved in massive art and antiquity acquisitions in Egypt. People look to get away from the wars and overcrowding and get back in touch with nature. They do this by escaping in their minds to far off places like that of where the “traveler” has been.
The poem begins when the “voice” of the poem meets a traveler. It is not clear however, as to “when” the traveler is from. Is he from the past or from the present? This is a technique that Shelly uses to add to the irony of the poem. It is an open-ended metaphor that allows the reader to decide. Shelly veers from the traditional sonnet slightly by allowing the reader to use his or her own intuition and later in the poem, cast his or her own moral judgments on the king.
The antiquated and lifeless statue is first introduced in the second line of the sonnet. What remains of the statue is “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone” (Shelley, line 2). In the third, fourth, and fifth lines, Shelly describes the remains of the statue’s face that has been separated from its legs over time. “Near them, on the sand, [h]alf sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, [a]nd wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command” (Shelley, lines 3-5). The sands of time have partially buried the mysterious face, a face wearing a sneering expression, a face that is cold and has the authority to command.
The sculptor of the ancient statue was able to capture the subject’s passion that he then permanently etched into the statue’s expression, “Tell that its sculptor well those passions read” (Shelly, line 6). The piece of stone was commissioned by Ozymandias, to assert his eternal majesty and power and so the sculptor carefully recreates the king’s likeness in the statue meant to survive for all eternity. And yet the sculptor seems to mock the king in all of his vanity which is described in lines 7-8, “Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, [t]he hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed”. The king’s heart “fed” the vanity and power that was visible in his expressive face. According to David B. Pirie, author of Shelley; Open Guides to Literature, Ozymandias had an “egotistical obsession with [his own] illusory power.”
Looking at lines 9-14, Shelly’s use of irony is again evident.
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.
According to Anne Janowitz, editor of Romanticism and Gender and Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition, “The rhetorical irony of Shelley’s sonnet is made by juxtaposing the heroic inscription of a living tyrant with that same inscription as it becomes a dismal epitaph on the ruler’s works, now reduced to dust.” What was meant to be a monument of vanity and an arrogant proclamation has, over time, become a self-imposed epitaph of mockery.
It is indeed an epitaph of mockery, a colossal wreck, a tombstone now broken in the dry and arid sand, mocking the very king who commissioned the statue. Ozymandias was a megalomaniac dictator who declared his power through the abundance of structures he had built in his honor. The Egyptians believed that they could “take it with them”, that power could defeat both death and time. Shelly’s own dislike for the tyrannical authority of his time is relayed through the “voice” of the poem and in that, he makes the statement that time will always outsmart man.
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