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Mirroring the nested nature of the poem’s three speakers, the setting of “Ozymandias” is similarly layered and mysterious. To begin, we don’t have a clear picture of the poem’s present. That is, we don’t know the specific time or place of the speaker’s address. We also don’t know when the speaker met the traveler whose story they recount. Perhaps the speaker has just heard this traveler’s story and is now recording it in a journal. Alternatively, maybe they met this traveler many years ago and are now recounting what they remember to friends in a tavern. Without more information, we can’t be sure about the actual scene of narration. We can, however, be certain that the traveler’s account references an experience they had in the Egyptian desert. This is the place where they came upon the fallen statue of Ozymandias, which is the Greek name for the ancient Egyptian king, Rameses II. In this regard, the poem effects something like a wormhole through space and time. That is, it connects the present of Shelley’s own time in nineteenth-century England to the time of Ozymandias in the Egypt of the thirteenth century BCE.

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