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.