Ozymandias
- This article is about Shelley's poem. For other uses, see Ozymandias (disambiguation).
The name Ozymandias (or Osymandias) is generally believed to refer to Ramesses the Great (i.e., Ramesses II) of Egypt. Osymandias represents a transliteration into Greek of a part of Ramesses's throne name, User-maat-re Setep-en-re.
Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said — "two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert ... near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lips, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
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." —
Ozymandias is the subject of a famous sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822).
The sonnet paraphrases the inscription on the base of the statue, given by Diodorus Siculus as "King of Kings am I, Osymandias. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works" (quoted by [1]).
The impact of the sonnet's message comes from its double irony. The tyrant declares, "Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Yet nothing remains of Ozymandias' works but the shattered fragments of his statue. So "the mighty" should despair — not as Ozymandias intended, but because they will share his fate of inevitable oblivion in the sands of time.
Shelley apparently wrote this sonnet in competition with his friend Horace Smith, as Smith published a sonnet a month after Shelley's which takes the same subject and makes the same moral point.
This short poem, probably Shelley's most famous due to its frequent appearance in anthologies, combines a number of great themes — the arrogance and transience of power, the permanence of real art and emotional truth, the contradictory and critical character of the relationship between artist and subject — with striking imagery, a setting that merges exotic distance (Egypt, Ozymandias, the desert) with the more familiar and topical (Napoleon, and a European, presumably English, traveller/commentator), and virtuoso diction. A miniature masterpiece, it is as monumental as the best poems of Horace or Pushkin.
Further reading
- Reiman, Donald H. and Sharon B. Powers. Shelley's Poetry and Prose. Norton, 1977. ISBN 0-393-09164-3.
External links
- Ramesses the Great (general information about Ramesses)
- Horace Smith's poem of the same name, and of the same themes
- Representative Poetry Online: Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), Ozymandias (text of poem with notes)
