“Ozymandias” is a sonnet written by the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Shelley wrote
“Ozymandias” in 1817 as part of a poetry contest with a friend and had it published in The
Examiner in 1818 under the pen name Glirastes. The title “Ozymandias” refers to an alternate name
of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II. In the poem, Shelley describes a crumbling statue of
Ozymandias as a way to portray the transience of political power and to praise art’s ability to
preserve the past. Although the poem is a 14-line sonnet, it breaks from the typical sonnet tradition
in both its form and rhyme scheme, a tactic that reflects Shelley’s interest in challenging
conventions, both political and poetic.

The Full Text of “Ozymandias”

1I met a traveller from an antique land,

2Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

3Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

4Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

5And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

6Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

7Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

8The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

9And on the pedestal, these words appear:

10My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

11Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

12Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

13Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

14The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

 “Ozymandias” Summary

o The speaker of the poem 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 which 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
—form 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. (and, in the process 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, 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.

 “Ozymandias” Themes

The Transience of Power

One of Shelley’s most famous works, “Ozymandias” describes the ruins of an ancient king’s statue in
a foreign desert. All that remains of the statue are two “vast” stone legs standing upright and a head
half-buried in sand, along with a boastful inscription describing the ruler as the “king of kings” whose
mighty achievements invoke awe and despair in all who behold them. The inscription stands
in ironic contrast to the decrepit reality of the statue, however, underscoring the ultimate transience
of political power. The poem implicitly critiques such power through its suggestion that both great
rulers and their kingdoms will fall to the sands of time.

In the poem, the speaker relates a story a traveler told him about the ruins of a “colossal wreck” of a
sculpture whose decaying physical state mirrors the dissolution of its subject’s—Ozymandias’s—
power. Only two upright legs, a face, and a pedestal remain of Ozymandias’s original statue, and even
these individual parts of the statue are not in great shape: the face, for instance, is “shattered."
Clearly, time hasn’t been kind to this statue, whose pitiful state undercuts the bold assertion of its
inscription. The fact that even this “king of kings” lies decaying in a distant desert suggests that no
amount of power can withstand the merciless and unceasing passage of time.

The speaker goes on to explain that time not only destroyed this statue, it also essentially erased the
entire kingdom the statue was built to overlook. The speaker immediately follows the king’s
declaration found on the pedestal of the statue—“Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”—
with the line “Nothing beside remains.” Such a savage contradiction makes the king’s prideful dare
almost comically naïve.

Ozymandias had believed that while he himself would die, he would leave a lasting and intimidating
legacy through everything he built. Yet his words are ultimately empty, as everything he built has
crumbled. The people and places he ruled over are gone, leaving only an abandoned desert whose
“lone and level sands” imply that there's not even a trace of the kingdom’s former glory to be found.
The pedestal’s claim that onlookers should despair at Ozymandias’s works thus takes on a new and
ironic meaning: one despairs not at Ozymandias’s power, but at how powerless time and decay make
everyone.

The speaker also uses the specific example of Ozymandias to make a broader pronouncement about
the ephemeral nature of power and, in turn, to implicitly critique tyranny. The speaker evokes the
image of a cruel leader; Ozymandias wears a “frown” along with the “sneer of cold command." That
such “passions” are now recorded only on “lifeless things” (i.e., the statue) is a clear rebuke of such a
ruler, and suggests that the speaker believes such tyranny now only exists on the face of a dead and
crumbling piece of stone.

The poem's depiction of the destruction of Ozymandias and his tyranny isn’t entirely fictional:
Ozymandias is the Greek name for the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II, who dramatically expanded
Egypt’s empire and who had several statues of himself built throughout Egypt. In fact, the Ancient
Greek writer Diodorus Siculus reported the following inscription on the base of one of Ozymandias’s
statues: "King of Kings am I, Ozymandias. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let
him surpass one of my works." By alluding to an actual ancient empire, and an actual king, the poem
reminds readers that history is full of the rises and falls of empires. No power is permanent,
regardless of how omnipotent a ruler believes himself to be. Even the “king of kings” may one day be
a forgotten relic of an “antique land.”

The Power of Art

“Ozymandias” famously describes a ruined statue of an ancient king in an empty desert. Although
the king’s statue boastfully commands onlookers to “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair,”
there are no works left to examine: the king’s cities, empire, and power have all disappeared over
time. Yet even as the poem insists that “nothing beside” the shattered statue and its pedestal
remains, there is one thing that actually has withstood the centuries: art. The skillful 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 Shelley’s poem positions art as perhaps the most enduring tool in
preserving humanity’s legacy.

Although the statue is a “wreck” in a state of “decay,” its individual pieces show the skill of the
sculptor and preserve the story of Ozymandias. The face is “shattered,” leaving only a mouth and
nose above the desert sand, but the “frown,” “wrinkled lip,” and “sneer” clearly show Ozymandias’s
“passions” (that is, his pride, tyranny, and disdain for others). The fragments interpret and preserve
the king’s personality and show onlookers throughout history what sort of a man and leader
Ozymandias truly was.

These fragments, then, are examples of art’s unique ability to capture and relate an individual’s
character even after their death. In fact, the poem explicitly emphasizes art’s ability to bring
personalities to life: the speaker explains that Ozymandias’s “passions” “yet survive” on the broken
statue despite being carved on “lifeless” stone. Ozymandias may be dead, yet, thanks to the sculptor
who “read” those “passions” and “mocked,” or made an artistic reproduction of them, his
personality and emotions live.

In addition to highlighting the sculptor’s artistic skill, Shelley’s poem also elevates the act of writing
through its focus on the inscription of the statue’s pedestal. The pedestal preserves Ozymandias’
identity even more explicitly than the statue itself. The inscription reveals his name, his status as
royalty (“King of Kings”), and his command for “Mighty” onlookers to “despair” at his superiority and
strength. His words are thus a lasting testament to his hubris, yet it is notably only the words
themselves—rather than the threat behind them—that survive. Without this inscription, none would
know Ozymandias’s name nor the irony of his final proclamation.

In other words, his legacy and its failure only exist because a work of art—specifically, a written work
—preserved them. The poem therefore presents art as a means to immortality; while everything else
disappears, art, even when broken and half-buried in sand, can carry humanity’s legacy.

This power of art is reflected by the composition of the poem itself. Shelley was aware that the
ancient Greek writer Diodorus Siculus had described a statue of the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II and
had transcribed the inscription on its pedestal as "King of Kings am I, Ozymandias. If anyone would
know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works." Shelley’s poem exists solely
because of Siculus’s description: Shelley and his friend and fellow writer Horace Smith had
challenged each other to a friendly competition over who could write the best poem inspired by
Siculus's description. This poem was Shelley’s entry, and it became by far the more famous of the
two. Like Siculus’ description of the statue, this poem keeps Ozymandias’s story and words alive for
subsequent generations.

The very composition of this poem, then, dramatizes the power of art: art can preserve people,
objects, cities, and empires, giving them a sort of immortality, and letting future generations “look on
[past] works” not with despair, but with wonder.

Man Versus Nature

As a Romantic poet, Shelley was deeply respectful of nature and skeptical of humanity’s attempts to
dominate it. Fittingly, his “Ozymandias” is not simply a warning about the transience of political
power, but also an assertion of humanity’s impotence compared to the natural world. The statue the
poem describes has very likely become a “colossal Wreck” precisely because of the relentless forces
of sand and wind erosion in the desert. This combined with the fact that “lone and level sands” have
taken over everything that once surrounded the statue suggests nature as an unstoppable force to
which human beings are ultimately subservient.

Shelley’s imagery suggests a natural world whose might is far greater than that of humankind. The
statue is notably found in a desert, a landscape hostile towards life. That the statue is “trunkless”
suggests sandstorms eroded the torso or buried it entirely, while the face being “shattered” implies
humanity’s relative weakness: even the destruction of a hulking piece of stone is nothing for nature.

The fact that the remains of the statute are “half sunk” under the sand, meanwhile, evokes a kind of
burial. In fact, the statement “nothing beside remains” can be read as casting the fragments of the
statue as the “remains” of a corpse. The encroaching sand described in the poem suggests that
nature has steadily overtaken a once great civilization and buried it, just as nature will one day
reclaim everything humanity has built, and every individual human as well.

The desert, not Ozymandias, is thus the most powerful tyrant in Shelley’s poem. It is “boundless” and
“stretch[es] far away” as though it has conquered everything the eye can see, just as it has
conquered Ozymandias’s statue. Ozymandias may be the king of kings, but even kings can be toppled
by mere grains of sand.

 Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Ozymandias”

o Lines 1-2

The opening line and half of the poem introduce 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. Put another
way, 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. The 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. By building such a layered structure, Shelley begins to establish the
thematic importance of art in the poem and the way that art, and interpretations of art, can
reverberate from one person to the next.

It's also worth taking a few moments to consider the traveller in the poem. On the one hand, the
traveller can 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. However, there is a second way to interpret the
traveller.

Shelley was inspired to write "Ozymandias" after reading the ancient Greek writer Diodorus Siculus’s
description of a real-life statue of Ozymandias. As a result, it's possible to argue that the traveller
from an ancient land who the speaker encounters actually is Siculus himself and that the meeting
between the speaker and traveller actually occurs when the speaker reads Siculus’s account.

 “Ozymandias” Symbols

Sand

In the poem, sand is a symbol of nature’s power and also of time itself. The sand has eroded and
buried the statue and all of Ozymandias’s works, a reminder that nature can destroy all human
achievements, no matter how substantial. Because it destroyed the statue over time, and because of
the idea of sand in an hourglass, sand also represents time itself, which has similarly worn down and
eventually buried Ozymandias's empire.

The Statue

The statue of Ozymandias has a few different symbolic meanings. First, it is a physical representation
of the might of human political institutions, such as Ozymandias’s empire; this is the symbolic
purpose for which Ozymandias himself had the statue built. However, because the statue has fallen
into disrepair, it also holds a symbolic meaning that Ozymandias didn't intend: it represents how
comparatively fragile human political institutions actually are in the face of both time and nature’s
might.

The statue also symbolizes the power of art. Through the sculptor's skill, the statue captures and
preserves the "passions" of its subject by stamping them on "lifeless" rock. And the statue also
symbolizes the way that art can have power beyond the intentions of even those who commission it.
While Ozymandias saw the statue as a way to forever capture his power and magnificence, the poem
hints that the statue so thoroughly reveals Ozymandias's haughty cruelty that it also serves to mock
him. While Ozymandias's great works have been destroyed and disappeared by nature and time, art
in the form of the stature endures, keeping Ozymandias's memory alive (albeit not in entirely the
ways he would have wanted).

It is also possible to interpret the statue in a third way. Because Ozymandias is clearly a tyrant, the
fact that the statue has become a "wreck" hints that the statue might symbolically represent the
speaker of the poem's hope and belief that tyranny will always crumble, which also happened to be
one of Shelley’s own personal political passions.

 “Ozymandias” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

o Enjambment

Shelley uses enjambment, which involves a string of words stretching across the boundary of the
end of one line into the beginning of the next, to have his lines enact the stretching of time or sand
that his words describe.
This use of enjambment occurs first in line two, when describing the statue’s legs that still stand
despite the passage of time: the fact that the content of the line stretches to the next mirrors the
way that the legs themselves have also endured through time.

Shelley’s enjambment of line 6 stretches the phrase about Ozymandias’s "passions" being preserved
in his stature all the way into line 7; this stretching of the flow of the text across two lines again
seems to mirror the way that the sculpture has allowed Ozymandias's passions to similarly survive.

The poem also uses enjambment to end the poem, in lines 12 and 13. Once again this use of
enjambment seems to support the idea of vastness and the passage of time. These lines describe not
the survival of a human structure, such as the statue, through time, but rather the "boundless"
desert that has swallowed up all remnants of Ozymandias's empire other than the stature.

It's also worth noting that lines 12 and 13 are the only two consecutive enjambed lines in the poem
—which suggests that the endurance of the desert is even more powerful than the endurance of any
human artifact, and will in the end wear all traces of humanity away.

o The traveller comes from an “antique” land, which implies that his nation is ancient
in the sense that it has a deep connection to the past, or perhaps even that its past
outweighs its present.

 Trunkless here means “without a torso.” Shelley uses this word to

introduce readers to the statue’s ruined condition. It has two legs
standing upright, but the body to which those legs should connect
has fallen and disappeared.
 Visage means “face,” and in this case refers to the face of
Ozymandias’s statue. Though shattered, at minimum the face's
mouth and nose are intact, which is enough to convey the ancient
ruler’s personality: cruel, condescending, and tyrannical.
o Passions” refers to Ozymandias’s emotions, and in particular, his arrogance, hatred,
and sense of superiority. The sculptor originally read those “passions” on
Ozymandias, and then carved them onto the stone, where they could be likewise
read by passersby like the traveller who describes the statue to the speaker.

 Stamped means “carved or engraved.” However, “stamped” also

calls to mind what Ozymandias wanted to do to his opposition:
stamp them out. The use of "stamped" implies that Ozymandias’s
tyranny is permanently branded into the statue along with his other
features.
 As he describes the artist who made the statue of Ozymandies, the
traveller notes the features of the statues face as well as the “hand
 that mocked them.” Mock, in this context, has two meanings. First,
it means both to make a copy or replica, as in the phrase "mock up."
Second, it means to make fun of someone, as in "the bully mocked
his victim's appearance."

By using the word "mock," the traveller suggests on the one hand
that the sculptor made an excellent likeness of Ozymandias, but
also that, by portraying Ozymandias's arrogant cruelty so vividly,
the sculptor ridiculed, or at least implicitly critiqued him.
o pedestal is a platform on which something—in this case, a statue—stands.
Ozymandias’s words are inscribed on the statue’s pedestal.

o Remains” in this poem can have three different meanings. It can be the verb “to
remain,” so the sentence reads “Nothing else is left,” or it could be one of two
nouns. “Remains” can refer to a historical relic or object, so the sentence would
mean that there is nothing left apart from the artifact of the statue. Or "remains"
could mean a corpse, in which case the broken statue is
being metaphorically portrayed as a dead human body: there was nothing besides
these remains.

However, the word "antique" in the poem also has a metatextual connotation: Shelley’s poem was
inspired by the ancient Greek writer Diodorus Siculus’s account of a real-life destroyed statue of
Ozymandias, and the poem even paraphrases Siculus's account in lines 10 and 11. As a result, the
traveller from an "ancient" land could be Siculus himself (and the "meeting" between the speaker
and the traveler would actually be the act of reading Siculus’s account). In this way of looking at the
poem, "antique" can be seen as referring to the book containing the account, which could be
described as being "antique" either because it is itself old, or because it contains ancient writings.

 Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Ozymandias”

o Form

"Ozymandias" is a sonnet, and as is traditional for a sonnet the poem is made up of 14 lines
of iambic pentameter (meaning each line has five iambs, poetic feet with a da-DUM rhythm).
However, after fulfilling those two most basic rules of the sonnet, "Ozymandias" goes on to play with
and break the form.

The poem does this in a few ways. First, it plays with rhyme scheme by generally, but not completely,
following the scheme of a famous type of sonnet called a Shakespearean sonnet.

In addition, while the poem's rhyme scheme is mostly that of a Shakespearean sonnet, its structure is
more similar to that of another type of sonnet called a Petrarchan sonnet. More specifically, the
poem uses the Petrarchan structure of having an eight-line octave followed by a six-line sestet:

 Octave: Lines 1-8 of the poem focus on the statue.

 Sestet: Lines 9-14 of the poem focus on the pedestal and surroundings.
The poem, then, invokes two of the most prominent types of sonnet—Shakespearean and
Petrarchan—but then breaks both types by refusing to follow the full conventions of either one. This
"breaking" of the poetic conventions that it references can be read as an echo of the broken work of
art—the statue—that "Ozymandias" describes.

o Meter

As is typical for a sonnet, the meter of "Ozymandias" is generally iambic pentameter, in which lines
are 10 syllables long with an alternating unstressed-stressed pattern. For instance, line 9 of the poem
features perfect iambic pentameter:

And on | the ped- | estal, | these words | appear:

However, the meter of the poem also has several moments of irregularity that it uses to create
particular effects. For instance, in line 2, there is a slight spondee (stressed-stressed) on “two vast”
that emphasizes the immensity of the statue’s legs:

Who said | —“Two vast | and trunk- | less legs | of stone

Similarly, the third line begins not with the expected iamb but with a trochee (stressed-unstressed)
before returning to iambs for the rest of the line:

Stand in | the des- | ert. . . . Near | them, on | the sand,

The trochee puts the stress on "stand," emphasizing the strange sight of these two legs (and nothing
else) sticking up out of the flat desert.

In line 7, Shelley includes a caesura in the form of a comma, and then emphasizes the pause from
the comma by changing the meter: “stamped on” is trochaic, not iambic.

Which yet | survive, | stamped on | these life- | less things,

The caesura and break in the metrical pattern serve to emphasize the "stamp," which in turn
highlights the way that the sculptor's artistic talent permanently captures the traits of Ozymandias
such that they have endured through time when everything else that Ozymandias created has
disappeared. (It also hints that Shelley believes that his own artistic talent, which is exemplified in his
use of the caesura and changed meter, also can create an enduring work of art.)

In lines 10 and 11, the poem's play with meter gets a bit more extreme.

My name | is Oz- | yman- | dias, King | of Kings;

Look on | my Works, | ye Might- | y, and | despair!

The best way to look at the meter of line 10 is probably to read the "dias" in Ozymandias as a single
syllable (though of course it isn't). Doing so makes that line iambic pentameter in theory, but in
practice the fact that "dias" truly is two syllables elongates the line in odd ways. The metrical oddities
then continue in line 11, too, since “Look on” is trochaic (or, to some readers' ears, might sound like a
spondee: "Look on"), as is the foot made up of the "y" in "mighty" followed by the "and."

Rather than being smooth, the meter of these lines is spiky. This spikiness, in the only lines of the
poem that quote Ozymandias directly, makes them stand out against the more regular meter of the
rest of the poem.

This fits with Ozymandias's speech in two ways:

  First, it shows how Ozymandias saw himself as standing above and separate
from the rest of the world.

 Second, it echoes the way that only the legs of Ozymandias's statue now
spike up from the otherwise flat, regular sands of the desert. Ozymandias
may have stood out for a while, but nature and time have ground him back
down.

Overall, it'd possible to argue that the shifting meter in the poem has a more general thematic
purpose: that it makes the poem feel as “broken” as the statue, while at the same time showing
Shelley's skill to be at least the equal of the sculptor.

o Rhyme Scheme

"Ozymandias" is a sonnet, and sonnets have strict rules when it comes to their rhyme schemes.
However, Shelley deliberately broke those rules when writing the poem. More specifically, the poem
largely follows the rhyme scheme of a Shakespearean sonnet, which traditionally follows the pattern
of ABABCDCDEFEFGG: six sets alternating rhymes braided together, followed then a
rhyming couplet at the end.

"Ozymandias" mostly follows this pattern, but introduces three important deviations:

 An extra A rhyme inserted into line 5

 An extra E rhyme inserted into line 9

 No concluding couplet

The result is an entirely non-standard sonnet rhyme scheme of ABABACDCEDEFEF.

Note also that the poem plays with its rhymes in another way: a number of its rhymes are
actually slant rhymes (“stone” and “frown” in lines 2 and 4, "read" and "fed" in lines 6 and 8, and
“appear” and “despair” in lines 9 and 11).

These changes to the traditional rhyme scheme heighten the similarities between the poem and the
statue that it describes: both are works of art that appear to be broken and missing pieces, and both
still endure despite the passing of time.

 “Ozymandias” Speaker

o The poem's primary speaker is anonymous and genderless, and all Shelley tells us
about them is that they "met a traveller from an antique land." The poem pointedly
does not include details about what this speaker thinks about the traveller, about
Ozymandias, or about the destruction of Ozymandias's works. In fact, the speaker
seems to primarily serve a function of distancing the reader from what is being told,
as the speaker is relating a story told to him or her by the traveller.

This traveller, the poem's second speaker, is likewise anonymous and genderless (although
statistically, their extensive travels to the middle of isolated deserts would make it likely they were
male, as women were strongly discouraged from being adventurers or making any sort of perilous
journey when Shelley wrote the poem).

Some readings of the poem speculate that the "traveller" is actually the ancient Greek writer
Diodorus Siculus, whose description of a statue of Ozymandias inspired Shelley to write his poem. In
this interpretation, the "meeting" of the speaker and the "traveller" occurs through the act of the
speaker reading Siculus's words.

Regardless, the traveller seems interested in art and the way it functions but spends even more time
describing the personality of the poem's third speaker: Ozymandias himself, through his words on
the pedestal. Of all three speakers, the poem provides the most details about Ozymandias: he
announces himself as a king whose concerns focus on his own greatness, power, and legacy.

 “Ozymandias” Setting

o “Ozymandias” has two primary settings:

 The first is an unspecified time and place—most likely, early 19th-century

England when the poem was written—where the speaker and the traveller
meet.

 The second is the recent past in Egypt, where the traveller sees a ruined
statue of Ozymandias in the desert.

The poem only spends a line and a half on the first setting, devoting the remaining twelve and a half
lines to the desert scene: by focusing on nature and the crumbling remnants of a statue, the poem
shows how nature can destroy everything human-made, from political systems to statues, and yet
how art, even when broken, can provide a kind of artistic immortality.

It's worth noting that if one subscribes to the theory that the traveller to whom the speaker refers is
actually Diodorus Siculus, an ancient Greek writer whose description of an actual destroyed statue
inspired Shelley's poem, then the settings of the poem subtly shift. In this case, the first setting is any
location in which the speaker can "meet" Siculus (i.e. by reading Siculus's passage in a book), while
the second setting is still the desert in Egypt, but it is Egypt not during Shelley's time but rather
during the time of the ancient Greeks.

 Literary and Historical Context of “Ozymandias”

Literary Context

Shelley was a Romantic poet, and as such, was very interested in the sublime power of nature, art,
and the individual. This poem addresses those concerns on a grand scale. Shelley was also a political
writer. Several years after the publication of “Ozymandias,” he published a pamphlet entitled "A
Philosophical View of Reform" in which he called for an end to tyranny and discussed the history of
empires crumbling over time. “Ozymandias” displays many of Shelley's concerns, both in terms of its
depiction of man versus nature and its apparent politics.

“Ozymandias” has several literary predecessors and contemporaries. Shelley and his friend and
fellow writer Horace Smith challenged each other to write about Ozymandias and his destroyed
statue after reading about the statue in a description written by the ancient Greek writer Diodorus
Siculus. Siculus described the pedestal of the real-life statue as containing an inscription that read
"King of Kings am I, Ozymandias. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him
surpass one of my works."

Shelley's poem, then, is a re-telling of an already-told story, and one can argue that in retelling the
story in his poem Shelley is actually taking up Ozymandias's challenge—that in writing "Ozymandias"
Shelley sought to surpass Ozymandias's works.

Historical Context
The historical Ozymandias’s legacy was not actually entirely dead when Shelley wrote this poem. In
fact, Shelley may have been inspired to write this poem by newspaper reports that the British
Museum had acquired the large head of an Egyptian statue: a statue that later turned out to be of
Ramses II, also known by his Greek name, Ozymandias. This fragment of a sculpture of Ozymandias
produced not despair at the futility of human achievements, but rather excitement, enthusiasm, and
ultimately, preservation in a museum, where the artifact would be protected from the elements and,
as much as possible, from time itself.

Some critics believe that the poem is partly—though certainly not entirely—a response to the rise
and fall of Emperor Napoleon, in France. In this reading, the poem serves as a warning to those who
seek political and military power, that they will fall be eventually be forgotten, just as Ozymandias
was.