Some Thoughts on Shelly’s Poem Ozymandias

Ozymandias By Percy Bysshe Shelly

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, whosea frown,
And wrinkled lip, 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.

Comments:

Think of mighty Ozymandias, king of kings; the ruler of a mighty empire (now forgotten). Seeking immortality, he commands his quarrymen to cut rock out of the earth; and his stone masons to shape that rock into human form, and his servants to move that rock from the quarry to the sculptor’s shop; and the sculptor to form that rock into his human visage and then to carve an inscription into the pedestal which is a challenge to his contemporaries and to all future societies.

Ozymandias has mobilized the best technology he possesses and his most talented artists to ensure that he lives forever. Yet despite his best efforts the traveler tells us that it has all crumbled, much of it to dust. It was all for naught.

But ironically, Shelley possesses a much more powerful technology, the poem. More powerful than stone which crumbles, the poem has breathed live into Ozymandias and now he IS immortal, as immortal as the poem which revived him.

Paul Kreingold