The lone and level sands stretch far away.įor more detail on the formal and poetic features of Ozymandias, visit the store and download the Ozymandias Study Bundle, featuring an easy-to-navigate and editable powerpoint with all the notes, analysis and explanation you’ll need. Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed: Which yet survive, stamped on those lifeless things, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,Īnd wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Stand in the desert… Near them on the sand, Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Rather than a monument to the powerful king of kings, the crumbled remains are testament only to the triumph of nature over the works of man, no matter how grandly conceived: I met a traveler from an antique land So far removed from any centre of power is it that the poem’s speaker only hears the story second-hand, through the words of a traveler I met… from an antique land. Here, the great and terrible Ozymandias suffers delusions of grandeur his statue – what’s left of it, anyway – stands only as a fractured ruin buried in the sands of a faraway desert. In response to a challenge from one of his friends, Shelley took these meagre clues and refashioned them into his own poem which was destined to become one of the most famous sonnets ever written. If any want to know how great I am and where I lie, let him outdo me in my work’. Shelley could never have seen this statue as it was already long vanished, but he had read a description, including an account of an inscription inlaid in the statue’s base: ‘ King of Kings Ozymandias am I. Ozymandias was better known as Ramses II (an Egyptian pharaoh who ruled from 1279 to 1213 BC his grand empire had long since, in Shelley’s day, fatally declined) who commissioned a statue to crown his mighty empire. In today’s poem, these lifelong concerns – aversion to authority and hatred of monarchy – marry perfectly with another of his favourite themes: the power of nature. In an 1813 poem, Queen Mab, Shelley deplored people blindly accepting outward shows of power and authority. Although he had aristocratic heritage, he wrote political and anti-monarchy poems regardless of the risks such material posed: the subject of Shelley’s 1812 pamphlet A Letter to Lord Edinburgh, Daniel Eaton, had been sentenced to prison for publishing an anti-establishment tract. He eloped with his second wife-to-be Mary Wollstonecraft because her family disapproved of their relationship. He broke off relations with his father, knowing the financial hardship this guaranteed, because of a political pamphlet he wrote at Oxford university (the pamphlet got Shelley expelled). “A ceaselessly energetic, desirous creator of poetry” David Mikics, Shelley scholar. If you would like to contact Alistair you can find him here on LinkedIn. This blog is illustrated by Alistair Hunt.
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