# Ozymandias

Updated October 9, 2026
The complete text of Ozymandias, with the story of its author, what it means, and notes to help you read it well.

## The poem

**Percy Bysshe Shelley** (1792–1822)
*Published in The Examiner in January 1818.*

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 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."

## About the author

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) was an English Romantic poet, radical thinker and friend of Lord Byron. Expelled from Oxford for atheism, he lived in exile in Italy, where he wrote his greatest works, including 'Prometheus Unbound'. He drowned in a sailing accident off the Italian coast at twenty-nine. 'Ozymandias' was written in 1817 in a friendly sonnet-writing contest with Horace Smith.

## Themes

The vanity of power. A king who commanded the mighty to despair at his works is now two legs and a broken face in empty sand. Everything the sculptor captured, the pride, the cruelty, outlasts the empire it served. The poem's irony is total: the inscription meant to inspire awe now advertises oblivion.

## Reading note

Count the voices: the narrator, the traveller, the sculptor (through his work), and Ozymandias himself on the pedestal. Four layers of telling separate us from the king, and each layer shrinks him further. By the final line, the famous closing about the 'lone and level sands', the king has vanished entirely and only the desert speaks.

## Frequently asked questions

### Who was Ozymandias?

The Greek name for Ramesses II, the Egyptian pharaoh who ruled in the 13th century BCE and built enormous monuments to himself. Shelley likely had in mind the colossal statue of Ramesses II that the British Museum was about to acquire, which was widely reported in 1817.

### What is the irony of the inscription?

'Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!' was meant to make rival kings despair at ever matching his glory. Now the 'works' are rubble, so the mighty may despair at how completely even the greatest power is erased.

### What does 'the hand that mocked them' mean?

'Mocked' here means both imitated and mocked in the modern sense: the sculptor's hand copied the king's passions in stone, and in doing so exposed them. The art survives its subject and quietly judges him.

### Why is the poem a sonnet?

Shelley bends the sonnet form to his purpose: instead of a love poem's turn toward devotion, the volta turns toward emptiness. The compact fourteen lines suit a monument in words, and the final line's flat desert vista lands harder for being so brief.