Ozymandias
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- This article is about Shelley's poem. For other uses, see Ozymandias (disambiguation).
Ozymandias
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 lips, 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."
Ozymandias is a famous sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley, first published in Leigh Hunt's Examiner of January 11, 1818. This short poem, probably Shelley's most famous due to its frequent appearance in anthologies, combines a number of great themes — the arrogance and transience of power, the permanence of real art and emotional truth, the contradictory and critical character of the relationship between artist and subject — with striking imagery, a setting that merges exotic distance (Egypt, Ozymandias, the desert) with the more familiar and topical (Napoleon, and a European, presumably English, traveller/commentator), and virtuoso diction. It is as famous as the best poems of Horace or Pushkin, but for Shelley scholars it is a piece of trivia and few studies of Shelley's career make much of it. Harold Bloom's Shelley's Mythmaking, the major Shelley study of the twentieth century and the book that restored the importance of Shelley's reputation, mentions it not at all.
The name Ozymandias (or Osymandias) is generally believed to refer to Ramesses the Great (i.e. Ramesses II) of Egypt. Osymandias represents a transliteration into Greek of a part of Ramesses's throne name, User-maat-re Setep-en-re. The sonnet paraphrases the inscription on the base of the statue, given by Diodorus Siculus as "King of Kings am I, Osymandias. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works" (quoted by [1]).
Ozymandias was republished in Shelley's Rosalind and Helen volume of 1819, and in the 'Advertisement' prefacing the volume, Shelley describes it as one of "a few scattered poems I left in England" which were used to pad out the book. Shelley also points out that the poem was selected for the book by his 'bookseller' (publisher) and not by himself. These nonchalant statements make is clear that Shelley was not particularly proud of this piece.
The impact of the sonnet's message comes from its double irony. The tyrant declares, "Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Yet nothing remains of Ozymandias' works but the shattered fragments of his statue. So "the mighty" should despair — not as Ozymandias intended, but because they will share his fate of inevitable oblivion in the sands of time.
Smith's poem of the same name
Shelley apparently wrote this sonnet in competition with his friend Horace Smith, as Smith published a sonnet a month after Shelley's which takes the same subject, tells the same story, and makes the same moral point. The following lines from Smith's poem may be compared with the conclusion of Shelley's:
- In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
- Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
- The only shadow that the Desart knows: -
- "I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,
- "The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
- "The wonders of my hand." - The City's gone, -
- Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
- The site of this forgotten Babylon.
Shelly's poem however refrains from stating a specific moral and merely presents a scene, leaving the reader to draw their own conclusions and ponder upon the themes. Nor does it address an audience of a specific time or place: until the English language falls into disuse or changes enough for the poems to be unintelligible, the audience is whoever is reading the poem and not just a Londoner. The image of a destroyed London will have no more or less effect on someone not from London than Ozymandias's statue. Also by not forcing home the point, as Smith does in his conclusion, Shelly saves space in his sonnet and uses it to fit in ideas entirely absent from Smith's poem.
Further reading
- Reiman, Donald H. and Sharon B. Powers. Shelley's Poetry and Prose. Norton, 1977. ISBN 0-393-09164-3.
External links
- Ramesses the Great (general information about Ramesses)
- Horace Smith's poem of the same name, and of the same themes
- Representative Poetry Online: Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), Ozymandias (text of poem with notes)
