“Ozymandias.”
One of Percy Bysshe Shelley's most
revered poems is the sonnet “Ozymandias.” Ozymandias was the Greek name
for Ramses II, the Egyptian pharaoh from whom Moses and the Israelites fled
during the Exodus. According to Siculus, a Greek historian who lived during the
1st century bc, the largest statue
in Egypt bore the inscription: “I am Ozymandias, king of kings; if anyone
wishes to know what I am and where I lie, let him surpass me in some of my
exploits.”
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
passions of the statue’s subject, a man who sneered with contempt for those
weaker than himself, yet fed his people because of something in his heart (“The
hand that mocked them and the heart that fed”). 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, far
away.
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.”
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