Ozymandias

Eng-3107
Traveler: A person from an ancient land who tells his tale to the narrator.
Ozymandias: Egyptian Pharaoh who is the subject of the traveler’s tale. Ozymandias (also spelled Osymandias)
is another name for one of Egypt’s most famous rulers, Ramses II (or Ramses the Great). He was born in 1314
BC and ruled Egypt for 66 years as the third king of the Nineteenth Dynasty. His exact age at death is uncertain,
but it was between 90 and 99. Ramses was a warrior king and a builder of temples, statues and other monuments.
He was pharaoh at the time Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, as recounted in the second book of the Bible,
Exodus. In Cecil B, de Mille’s melodramatic film The Ten Commandments, the late Yul Brynner portrays Ramses,
and Charlton Heston plays Moses.
Sculptor: The craftsman who sculpted the statue of Ramses.
Meter
The poem is in iambic pentameter, in which each line has five pairs of syllables. These pairs are called feet. The
first syllable of each pair is unstressed; the second is stressed. The first two lines of the poem demonstrate the
metric pattern of the poem.
.....1..........2..........3..........4..........5
I MET../..aTRAV../..lerFROM ../..an AN../..tique LAND
.....1...............2...............3...............4...............5
Who SAID../..Two VAST../..and TRUNK ../..less LEGS.. / ..of STONE
Rhyme Scheme
The rhyme scheme is ababacdcedefef.
Theme
The might and majesty of a king do not last; only great art endures. The statue, symbolizing the power and glory
of the pharaoh, is crumbling. Yet the arrogant sneer on the shattered visage remains intact as a testament to the
ability of the sculptor to read and capture the passions of his ruler. Thus, it is the pharaoh’s lowly servant, the
sculptor, who delivers the more powerful message here. The king’s message “look on my work, ye Mighty, and
despair” is an ironic indictment of his pride. Oddly, Shelley’s theme valid as a general statement does not
ultimately apply to Ozymandias, or Ramses II. For Ramses remains today perhaps the most famous of Egyptian
pharaohs. After thousands of years, he continues to intrigue historians, archeologists, and other scholars. In
addition, many of the monuments erected during his rule still stand.
Literary Devices
Following are examples of literary devices Shelley uses in the poem.
Alliteration: Repetition of a vowel sound.
Two vast and trunk less legs
Cold command
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
Boundless and bare
Lone and level sands stretch
Anastrophe: Inversion of the Normal Word Order.
Well those passions read (normally, read those passions well)
Enjambment: Carrying the sense of one line of verse over to the next line without a pause.
Ashatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Eng-3107
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
Synecdoche: Substitution of a part to stand for the whole, or the whole to stand for a part.
The hand that mock’d them
Summary
“Ozymandias” is a sonnet written by the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley wrote
“Ozymandias” in 1817 as part of a poetry contest with a friend and had it published in The Examiner in 1818
under the pen name Glirastes. The title “Ozymandias” refers to an alternate name of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh
Ramses II. In the poem, Shelley describes a crumbling statue of Ozymandias as a way to portray the transience
of political power and to praise art’s ability to preserve the past. Although the poem is a 14- line sonnet, it breaks
from the typical sonnet tradition in both its form and rhyme scheme, a tactic that reflects Shelley’s interest in
challenging conventions, both political and poetic.
The speaker of the poem meets a traveller who came from an ancient land. The traveller describes two large stone
legs of a statue, which lack a torso to connect them and which stand upright in the desert. Near the legs, half-
buried in sand, is the broken face of the statue. The statue’s facial expression a frown and a wrinkled lip_form a
commanding. Haughty sneer. The expression shows that the sculptor understood the emotions of the person the
statue is based on, and now those emotions live on, carved forever on inanimate stone.
In making the face, the sculptor’s skilled hands mocked up a perfect recreation of those feelings and of the heart
that fed those feelings (and, in the process, so perfectly conveyed the subject’s cruelty that the statue itself seems
to be mocking its subject). The traveller next describes the words inscribed on the pedestal of the statue, which
say: “My

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