Ozymandias

By Percy Bysshe Shelley

“Ozymandias” is a 14-line sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley, first published in The Examiner on 11 January 1818, about a traveller who finds the shattered statue of an ancient king in the desert. The pedestal still boasts “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” but nothing else survives. Ozymandias is the Greek name for the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II.

The usual reading is that power doesn’t last. The sharper point is who does last: not the king but the unnamed sculptor who saw through him, and the poet who tells the story. Even that survival is partial. The art is broken too, and the sand is still coming.

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Summary · The Poem · Background · Analysis and Themes · Form and Technique · Notable Lines · Themes · FAQ
Glossary · In Popular Culture · Related Poems

Summary

The speaker repeats what a traveller from “an antique land” told him. In the desert stand two huge stone legs with no body. Nearby, half buried in sand, lies the broken face of the statue, still wearing the frown and “sneer of cold command” the sculptor gave it.

On the pedestal the king’s words survive: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; / Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” But there are no works left to look at. Around the wreck, empty sand stretches in every direction to the horizon.

The Poem

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.”

Background

Shelley wrote “Ozymandias” around Christmas 1817, when he was 25 and living at Marlow in Buckinghamshire. His friend Horace Smith was visiting, and the two poets agreed to write a sonnet each on the same subject: a ruined monument in the Egyptian desert. Shelley’s appeared in Leigh Hunt’s radical weekly The Examiner on 11 January 1818, signed “Glirastes.” Smith’s followed a few weeks later under the title “On a Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt.” Shelley reprinted his sonnet in Rosalind and Helen in 1819.

Ozymandias is the Greek form of User-maat-re, a throne name of Ramesses II, who ruled Egypt for about 66 years in the thirteenth century BC and covered the country in monuments to himself. The inscription in the poem adapts one recorded by the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus: “King of Kings Ozymandias am I. If any want to know how great I am and where I lie, let him outdo me in my work.” The timing was topical too. A colossal head of Ramesses, the “Younger Memnon,” had been dragged from Thebes by Giovanni Belzoni and was on its way to the British Museum, where it arrived in 1821.

The contest has its own irony. Smith’s sonnet is competent and almost completely forgotten; Shelley’s became one of the best-known poems in English. A poem about which works survive ended up proving its point on its two authors.

Analysis and Themes

“Ozymandias” is so often reduced to “power doesn’t last” that it is easy to miss how it makes the case. The poem works through three devices: an inscription that turns against its author, a story held at arm’s length, and a sculptor who quietly wins the argument.

The Boast That Changed Its Meaning

“Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” was carved as a threat: rival kings should despair because they will never build anything as great. Time has reversed the meaning without changing a word. Now the line tells the mighty to despair because even works like these come to nothing. Shelley makes the reversal land with a hard cut. The command to look is followed at once by three flat words, “Nothing beside remains,” and then by nothing but desert. The boast has outlived the empire only to become its epitaph.

The King Is Only a Rumour

We never meet Ozymandias. The poet reports what a traveller said, the traveller describes a statue, the statue shows what a sculptor saw, and the sculptor’s work preserves what the king commanded. That is four layers between us and the man who wanted to be looked at by every age to come.

The structure is the argument. Ozymandias planned to confront the future face to face. Instead he reaches it second-hand, as a story told by a stranger about a broken face in a place nobody names. The poem does to him exactly what time has done.

The Sculptor Wins, Barely

The key line is the most compressed: “The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.” The hand is the sculptor’s, and “mocked” works in two senses at once. In older English it means to imitate or copy, and the sculptor copied the king’s passions faithfully in stone. It also means to ridicule, and the frown and sneer read now like a portrait of arrogance done by someone who saw straight through it. The heart that fed those passions was the king’s.

So the thing that survives is not the king’s power but the artist’s judgment of it, and by extension Shelley’s poem, which judges both. Shelley is too honest to make this a victory. The sculptor’s work is itself a “shattered visage,” half sunk and decaying. Art outlasts tyranny, the poem suggests, but only in fragments, and the sand keeps coming.

Form and Technique

“Ozymandias” is a sonnet: 14 lines of iambic pentameter. Its rhyme scheme, ABABACDCEDEFEF, fits neither the Italian nor the English pattern. The rhymes interlock and slip, with the A sound spilling into the second quatrain and the E sound carrying over into the last lines. It reads like a sonnet that has shifted on its foundations, which suits a poem about a monument that has fallen over.

Loosely, the poem divides like an Italian sonnet: eight lines describe the ruin, and the last six give the inscription and what surrounds it. But the real turn comes late and in mid-line, at “Nothing beside remains” in line 12. Caesuras and the trailing dots of line 3 (“Stand in the desert. . . . Near them”) break the syntax into pieces like the statue.

The word choice sets scale against ruin in almost every line: “vast,” “colossal,” “King of Kings” and “Mighty” pressed against “trunkless,” “shattered,” “lifeless,” “decay” and “Wreck.” The last line is one of the most carefully weighted in the language. The alliteration of “boundless and bare” and “lone and level,” and the long vowels of “far away,” stretch the line out flat, like the desert it describes.

Notable Lines

Three passages take the poem from its distant frame to the king’s boast to its empty close.

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert.

Lines 1 to 3

The opening sets everything at a distance. A king who ruled an empire now reaches us through a chance meeting with an unnamed stranger, and the first thing we learn about his statue is what it has lost.

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Lines 10 to 11

The only words the king speaks, and the source of the poem’s central irony. Written as a challenge to rival rulers, they now read as a warning to all of them.

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Lines 12 to 14

The turn and the ending. Three words demolish the boast, and the last line opens onto a horizon of sand. After all the talk of might, the poem finishes on emptiness.

Themes

The impermanence of power. A king who called himself King of Kings is reduced to two legs, a face in the sand and a boast nobody obeys. Whatever power achieves, time and nature erase.

Tyranny and pride. Shelley was a political radical who despised the kings and ministers of his own day. The “sneer of cold command” is not only ancient Egypt; it is a portrait of every ruler who mistakes fear for respect.

Art and memory. The sculptor and the poet preserve what the king could not. The poem argues that art is how the past reaches us, while admitting that art decays too.

Frequently Asked Questions

These are the questions readers ask most often about “Ozymandias.”

Who was Ozymandias?

Ozymandias was the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II, also called Ramesses the Great, who ruled for about 66 years in the thirteenth century BC. “Ozymandias” is the Greek version of one of his throne names, and it was the name Greek writers such as Diodorus Siculus used for him.

What is the poem Ozymandias about?

It is about how even the greatest power is erased by time. A traveller describes the ruined statue of a boastful king whose inscription orders the mighty to look on his works, though nothing but sand remains.

When was Ozymandias written?

Shelley wrote “Ozymandias” in late December 1817, in a friendly sonnet contest with Horace Smith. It was published in The Examiner on 11 January 1818.

Is Ozymandias a sonnet?

Yes. It has 14 lines of iambic pentameter, but its rhyme scheme, ABABACDCEDEFEF, follows neither the Italian nor the English sonnet pattern.

How do you pronounce Ozymandias?

It is pronounced oz-ee-MAN-dee-us, with the stress on the third syllable.

Glossary

Older words and names that are easy to misread.

• antique (line 1): Ancient, not collectible. The “antique land” is Egypt.
• trunkless (line 2): Without a torso. The legs still stand, but the body they held up is gone.
• visage (line 4): A face.
• mocked (line 8): Both copied, the older meaning, and ridiculed, the modern one.
• fed (line 8): Nourished or kept alive. The king’s heart fed the passions the sculptor recorded.
• King of Kings (line 10): A title claiming power over all other rulers, used by Egyptian, Persian and other ancient monarchs.
• ye Mighty (line 11): “You mighty ones,” addressed to the other powerful rulers of the world.
• beside (line 12): Besides, apart from this.

In Popular Culture

Breaking Bad (2013): The 14th episode of the fifth season, first aired on 15 September 2013, is titled “Ozymandias” and shows the collapse of Walter White’s drug empire. Bryan Cranston read the whole sonnet over desert footage in a teaser for the final episodes.

Watchmen (1986–1987): In Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s graphic novel, the character Adrian Veidt takes the name Ozymandias, and Shelley’s poem is quoted in the book as a comment on his ambitions.

Related Poems

• Ozymandias by Horace Smith: The rival sonnet from the same contest, on the same subject, now remembered mainly because of Shelley’s.
• Sonnet 55 by William Shakespeare: “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments / Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme.” The confident version of the claim Shelley makes with such doubt.
• Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray: A meditation on how “the paths of glory lead but to the grave.”
• Ode to the West Wind by Percy Bysshe Shelley: Shelley’s other great poem about destruction, written two years later, where ruin clears the way for renewal.