Ozymandias: Symbols | SparkNotes

The Crumbled Statue

The crumbled statue of Ozymandias symbolizes the ephemeral nature of power. Based on the traveler’s description of the statue’s ruins, we readers can imaginatively reconstruct what the original work may have looked like. Towering atop its pedestal, the memorial to the mighty “King of Kings” (line 10) would have seemed immense and imposing to anyone standing beneath it. With its “frown / And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command” (lines 4–5), the statue reflects the aura of total dominance that must have characterized Ozymandias’s reign. The words on the statue’s pedestal further suggest the image of a tyrant who enjoyed lording his power over others: “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” (line 11). Yet for all the man’s evident ambition and lust for power, Ozymandias has long since ceased to have such an imposing effect. The only parts of his statue left standing are “two vast and trunkless legs of stone” (line 2). The head, with its intimidating sneer, is now but a “shattered visage” (line 4) half buried in the sand. This crumbled statue reflects the ultimate futility of Ozymandias’s bid for immortality. As such, it reveals the ephemerality of all power.

The Desert Wasteland

The crumbled statue of Ozymandias stands in ruins in the middle of a desert wasteland, where everything gets reduced to sand. The original statue must have been impressive in its ability to jut up from the desert’s prevailing flatness. And indeed, given the barrenness of this desert landscape, it would have been remarkable to see how all the “Works” (line 11) referenced on the pedestal inscription could have formed a civilization in the wilderness. But everything that was awe-inspiring in Ozymandias’s own day has evidently turned to dust. Ruined fragments of the great statue remain strewn about, but as the traveler tells, that’s all there is to see (lines 12–14):

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

The “boundless and bare” desert that stretches as far as the eye can see in every direction obviously conjures an image of vast space. Counterintuitively, however, the desert symbolizes the vastness of time. More than thirty centuries stand between the historical reign of Ozymandias and the time of Shelley’s writing. Over the course of those thirty centuries, dry desert winds have slowly but surely eroded the statue and reduced it to “the lone and level sands.” In time’s vast reaches, nothing truly lasts.

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