Ozymandias: Motifs | SparkNotes

Quotation

The text of “Ozymandias” consists almost entirely of quotations. The poem opens with the main speaker introducing the account of a traveler, which they proceed to relate—apparently—verbatim. This quotation, which is explicitly indicated by quote marks, takes up the rest of the poem. But there’s an additional quotation that appears in the middle of the traveler’s account, and which isn’t indicated by quote marks. This is the traveler’s quotation of the words written on the pedestal, which are themselves a quotation of words supposedly uttered by the great Egyptian king, Ozymandias, to his sculptor. There are thus five layers of quotation in the poem, which we can schematize as follows:

Speaker > Traveler > Words on the Pedestal > Sculptor > Ozymandias

The prevalence of quotation introduces a question of reliability. Like in the game of telephone, where messages get increasingly warped as they pass from one person to another, we have to ask what warping may have taken place in this relay through time. The traveler himself subtly references this concern in line 8, when he says the sculptor’s hand “mocked” the expression on Ozymandias’s face. Here, mocked can mean both “imitated” and “derided.” Hence, there’s a possibility that the sculptor’s representation of the king is, in fact, grossly exaggerated.

Gratuitous Capitalization of Nouns

Prior to the beginning of the eighteenth century, the English language didn’t have strict guidelines for capitalization. As a result, writers tended to capitalize frequently, often using capitals for most—if not all—nouns. In modern English, however, we limit the use of capitalization to relatively few situations, such as proper nouns, the pronoun “I,” and the first word of a sentence. Nowadays the capitalization of nouns seems old-fashioned and gratuitous, though from time to time we may use capitals as a form of emphasis. Shelley plays with these historical spelling differences to clever effect. The first gratuitous capitalization of nouns appears in the words of Ozymandias, quoted by the traveler in lines 10–11:

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

On the one hand, the capitalization of “King of Kings,” “Works,” and “Mighty” indicates the age of the text being quoted. These words come from ancient times, and the capitalization gives them a suitably old-fashioned appearance. On the other hand, this use of capitalization also inflates the importance Ozymandias’s achievements. As if to draw ironic attention to this inflation, the traveler immediately follows the quote with a gratuitous capitalization of their own, when they refer to “the decay / Of that colossal Wreck” (lines 12–13).