Instead of having just one speaker, “Ozymandias” has three: the main speaker, the traveler, and Ozymandias himself. The first person to speak in the poem is the one we would typically refer to as the speaker. It is their voice that utters the entire poem, even though most of the poem consists of the quoted speech of others. Given how little the main speaker says of their own accord, we have virtually no information about them—only that they spoke with “a traveller from an antique land” (line 1). It is this traveler whom the main speaker quotes at length, introducing the poem’s second voice. Even though we hear more from this traveler, we have virtually no information about them either. We only know that they either grew up in the Middle East, or else traveled there at some point in their life. Shelley introduces a third voice when the traveler quotes the words carved into the pedestal, which are themselves a quotation (lines 10–11):

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

By layering these three voices on top of one another, Shelley has created something like a portal through historical time. With one quotation nested inside of another, we readers eventually get access to the words of a once-great but now long-dead king.

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