Summary
The speaker recalls having met a traveler “from an antique
land,” who told him a story about the ruins of a statue in the desert
of his native country. Two vast legs of stone stand without a body,
and near them a massive, crumbling stone head lies “half sunk” in
the sand. The traveler told the speaker that the frown and “sneer
of cold command” on the statue’s face indicate that the sculptor
understood well the emotions (or "passions") of the statue’s subject. The memory of those emotions survives "stamped" on the lifeless statue, even though both the sculptor and his subject are both now dead. On the pedestal of the statue appear the
words, “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look on my works,
ye Mighty, and despair!” But around the decaying ruin of the statue,
nothing remains, only the “lone and level sands,” which stretch
out around it.
Form
“Ozymandias” is a sonnet, a fourteen-line poem metered
in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme is somewhat unusual for a
sonnet of this era; it does not fit a conventional Petrarchan pattern,
but instead interlinks the octave (a term for the first eight lines
of a sonnet) with the sestet (a term for the last six lines), by
gradually replacing old rhymes with new ones in the form ABABACDCEDEFEF.
Commentary
This sonnet from 1817 is
probably Shelley’s most famous and most anthologized poem—which
is somewhat strange, considering that it is in many ways an atypical
poem for Shelley, and that it touches little upon the most important
themes in his oeuvre at large (beauty, expression, love, imagination).
Still, “Ozymandias” is a masterful sonnet. Essentially it is devoted
to a single metaphor: the shattered, ruined statue in the desert wasteland,
with its arrogant, passionate face and monomaniacal inscription
(“Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”). The once-great king’s
proud boast has been ironically disproved; Ozymandias’s works have crumbled
and disappeared, his civilization is gone, all has been turned to
dust by the impersonal, indiscriminate, destructive power of history.
The ruined statue is now merely a monument to one man’s hubris,
and a powerful statement about the insignificance of human beings
to the passage of time. Ozymandias is first and foremost a metaphor
for the ephemeral nature of political power, and in that sense the
poem is Shelley’s most outstanding political sonnet, trading the
specific rage of a poem like “England in 1819”
for the crushing impersonal metaphor of the statue. But Ozymandias
symbolizes not only political power—the statue can be a metaphor
for the pride and hubris of all of humanity, in any of its manifestations.
It is significant that all that remains of Ozymandias is a work
of art and a group of words; as Shakespeare does in the sonnets,
Shelley demonstrates that art and language long outlast the other
legacies of power.
Of course, it is Shelley’s brilliant poetic rendering
of the story, and not the subject of the story itself, which makes
the poem so memorable. Framing the sonnet as a story told to the
speaker by “a traveller from an antique land” enables Shelley to
add another level of obscurity to Ozymandias’s position with regard
to the reader—rather than seeing the statue with our own eyes, so
to speak, we hear about it from someone who heard about it from
someone who has seen it. Thus the ancient king is rendered even
less commanding; the distancing of the narrative serves to undermine
his power over us just as completely as has the passage of time. Shelley’s
description of the statue works to reconstruct, gradually, the figure
of the “king of kings”: first we see merely the “shattered visage,”
then the face itself, with its “frown / And wrinkled lip and sneer
of cold command”; then we are introduced to the figure of the sculptor,
and are able to imagine the living man sculpting the living king,
whose face wore the expression of the passions now inferable; then
we are introduced to the king’s people in the line, “the hand that
mocked them and the heart that fed.” The kingdom is now imaginatively
complete, and we are introduced to the extraordinary, prideful boast
of the king: “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” With that,
the poet demolishes our imaginary picture of the king, and interposes centuries
of ruin between it and us: “ ‘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.”
