Ozymandias

©2011 eNotes.com, Inc. or its Licensors. Please see copyright information at the end of this document.

Ozymandias
The Poem
“Ozymandias” is a sonnet composed by the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and named for its subject,
with the Greek name of the Egyptian king Ramses II, who died in 1234 b.c.e. The poem follows the
traditional structure of the fourteen-line Italian sonnet, featuring an opening octave, or set of eight lines, that
presents a conflict or dilemma, followed by a sestet, or set of six lines, that offers some resolution or
commentary upon the proposition introduced in the octave.

The poem is conventionally written in iambic pentameter (that is, ten syllables per line of coupled unstressed
then stressed sounds), so the poem’s subject matter is framed both by the structural and metrical constraints
chosen by the poet.

The first-person narrator of “Ozymandias” introduces a conversation he has chanced to have with a “traveller
from an antique land” in line 1. The reader knows neither the identity of the traveler nor the circumstances
wherein the poet has encountered the traveler but may assume he is a source of information about a strange
and unfamiliar world.

The remaining thirteen lines of the poem quote verbatim the tale that the traveler has borne from his trek into
the desert. The intrepid explorer has encountered “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone,” the vestiges of a
statue in disrepair whose head lay as a “shattered visage” nearby. Despite its broken state, the “frown,” the
“wrinkled lip” and “sneer of cold command” of the statue’s face bespeak its sculptor’s skill in capturing the
vanity and self-importance of its subject.

The traveler remarks that the artist has “well those passions read which yet survive”—that is, those indications
of the subject’s character, indelibly “stamped on…lifeless things”: “the hand that mocked them, and the heart
that fed.”

The octave thus confronts the reader in its first movement with an ironic portrait of an ancient monarch whose
fame and stature have been immortalized in a static gaze that connotes paradoxically both celebrity and
dissolution. In the revelatory sestet which follows, the poet posits, through the testimony of the traveler, the
fate of vainglorious men. On the pedestal, he finds written the great man’s empty boast: “My name is
Ozymandias, King of Kings,/ Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Yet “Nothing beside remains” but ruin, a “colossal Wreck, boundless and bare” against the lonely landscape
of sand and cruel, penetrating sunlight. A double irony is at work; neither the great man nor the work of the
artist remains in credible shape to challenge or delight the imagination of those who would encounter it. King
and artisan, mover and maker, share the same destiny. The poem ends with the reader/observer’s gaze fixed
upon this pathetic legacy, contemplating his own mortality.

Ozymandias 1
Forms and Devices
The Italian sonnet presents the poet with the challenge of using an utterly familiar form in an innovative or
provocative way. The chief variables within this form involve rhyme scheme. The traditional Italian sonnet
features an abba, abba, cde, cde rhyme scheme, each letter representing a different end rhyme that is repeated
in pattern.

In “Ozymandias,” Shelley chooses to forgo the conventional scheme and employs a more eccentric abab,
acdc, ece, fef pattern that creates the immediate effect of a woven tapestry of sound and rhythm that helps to
underscore the poem’s essential irony. As the reader’s expectations are unmet, the very syntax forced by the
unusual rhyme of the poem creates tension that matches that of the theme.

Critics have long noted the “Chinese box” frame in which the story of Ozymandias has come to the poet and
thus, indirectly, to the reader. Each line of the poem, from first to last, reveals successively one more layer of
the narrative’s essential irony.

One learns first something of the poet’s conversation with the mysterious traveler “from an antique land.”
The poet, in turn, reports but one tidbit of that conversation, “Who said—,” in the very words of the traveler.
Laboriously, the speaker then moves through each wave of recognition and interpretation of what he has
encountered, climaxing with the presentation of Ozymandias’s inscription.

Shelley’s sonnet is remarkable for its spare and stark imagery. The poet is determined to re-create the barren
desert landscape, the poetic counterpoint to the morbid and deserved fate of Ozymandias, the pompous fool.
To do so requires that he carefully circumscribe his choice of descriptors to connote neither grandeur nor
panoramic vista, but rather singular loneliness and constrained, fragmented solitude. Hence such modifiers as
“trunkless,” “Half-sunk,” “shattered,” “decay,” and “wreck” serve his purpose well.

Consequently, the compression of the sonnet form, the unconventional rhyme scheme, the point of view
chosen for reader entry, and the carefully wrought diction of the poem achieve the effect the poet was seeking.
Amid vast stretches of unbroken sameness, the traveler—followed by the poet, then the reader—comes upon a
bleak personage whose severed limbs and head first shock and dismay, then elicit reluctant mockery for the
egotism of its subject.

Themes and Meanings

“Ozymandias” is at first glance a sonnet about the transitory nature of life and its pretensions of fame and
fortune. The decaying, ancient statue bears witness to the fact that the pursuit of power and glory for their own
sakes are not only fleeting, but they are also illusory, unworthy ambitions even within the lifetime of their
seekers.

The nineteenth century was filled with “discoveries” of ancient landscapes, built upon a historiography of
“great men,” who were to elicit the attention and admiration of a generation of scholars and writers. Shelley
chose, however, to poke holes in the “great man” theory of history, questioning its validity and its rationality.

The poem also works on another level, however—as a candid, poignant confession by the artist that his work is
also ephemeral, and that as style, manner, and fashion change, so do reputation and honor. Such a
confessional spirit was particularly appropriate for Shelley and other Romantics, that clan of “rebel
spirits”—among them William Blake; George Gordon; Lord Byron; John Keats; Samuel Taylor Coleridge;
and William Wordsworth.

Forms and Devices 2

This new generation of poets flouted tradition, inventing their own vocabularies, subject matters, and poetic
form, and generally laboring to raise the poet’s consciousness of his own imagination to an unprecedented
level. “Ozymandias” exemplifies both in theme and in execution these “rebellious” notions.

Often, the poet himself was the topic and focus of his poetry, rather than the grander themes of man and God
or the courtship of ladies and gentlemen. Audiences for the first time were confronted with the artist’s
“personality,” and not only his work. Autobiography, not history, was to become the focal point of literary
endeavor—and literary criticism.

The Romantics revitalized the craft of poetry in the nineteenth century, rescuing it from the narrow constraints
of “classicism” built upon elevated language, artificial form, and exaggerated dependence on tradition. The
price paid for this departure was the risk of alienating themselves from public taste and private virtue. The
Romantics, Shelley chief among them, constructed their own “traditions” in various manifestos about the
components, meaning, and social utility of poetry, even offering advice about how their poetry should be
interpreted.

More than that, Shelley, in works such as Prometheus Unbound (1820) and A Defence of Poetry (1840),
attempted to create a public persona for the poet as an arbiter of morality, genius, and political order. Thus,
the Romantic, as exemplified in Shelley himself, was peculiarly subject to the rather pretentious
self-promotion of his vocation—not unlike the wizened Ozymandias of his sonnet.

The ancient king’s narcissism, his relentless declarations of immortality and supremacy, might serve as
warning also to the artist whose folly may lead him to similar vanity. Read this way, “Ozymandias” is a sober
exhortation to poets and politicians alike to foster realistic assessments of their influence and worth; the
disposition to make truth serve the selfish ends of vainglorious men is a theme of history Shelley discerned
well in his own time and attempted to expose in his poetry. In that regard, “Ozymandias” remains a powerful
antidote to artistic pretensions and political hypocrisy.

Copyright Notice

©2011 eNotes.com, Inc.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

No part of this work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means
graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, Web distribution or information
storage retrieval systems without the written permission of the publisher.

For complete copyright information, please see the online version of this work:
http://www.enotes.com/ozymandias-salem

Themes and Meanings 3