Ozymandias by P.B. SHELLEY (Poem, Summary & Analysis)

 

Ozymandias

by P.B. SHELLEY

(Poem, Summary & Analysis) 

 

Shelley was born on 4 August 1792 at Field Place, Broadridge Heath, near Horsham, West Sussex, England. He was the eldest son of Sir Timothy Shelley and his wife, Elizabeth Pilfold. He had four younger sisters and one much younger brother. Shelley’s early childhood was sheltered and mostly happy. He was particularly close to his sisters and his mother, who encouraged him to hunt, fish and ride. At age six, he was sent to a day school run by the vicar of Warnham church, where he displayed an impressive memory and gift for languages.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets. He was a superb craftsman, a lyric poet without rival, and surely one of the most advanced sceptical intellects ever to write a poem. Shelley did not achieve fame during his lifetime, but recognition of his achievements in poetry grew steadily following his death and he became an important influence on subsequent generations of poets including Browning, Swinburne, Hardy and Yeats.

Shelley also wrote prose fiction and a quantity of essays on political, social, and philosophical issues. From the 1820s, his poems and political and ethical writings became popular in Owenist, Chartist, and radical political circles and later drew admirers as diverse as Karl Marx, Mahatma Gandhi, and George Bernard Shaw.

Ozymandias

(The Poem)

I met a traveler 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 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.”

Summary

In this poem, the poet met a traveler. The traveler tells the poet about the broken statue in the desert. He says that the statue is made up of stone in an old land. It stands on legs only. The upper body was destroyed. Thus, it has no head, neck, and limbs. The face of the statue lay nearby on the sand. It was damaged and destroyed by the passage of time. It was half sunk in the sand. Also, it showed a sign of anger or displeasure.  His lips were wrinkled. There was an expression of hostility on his face. The face depicted that he was a dominating king. He had no feelings for other people. Moreover, his statue depicted his passion to survive even after his death.

The artist has engraved these expressions in the statue very well. One could easily see the rough behaviour of the king in the statue’s expressions. The poet praises the sculptor, because he had perfectly copied the minutest expressions and wrinkles on the king’s face.

The words

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

were engraved. The king announced himself as the mightiest. He wanted other kings to feel belittled in front of him. However, the poet says that everything got destroyed and damaged with the passage of time. The broken pieces of the statue were only lying around. Also, the dessert was very vast. The statue could be seen nowhere. The king was egoistic. Also, he was filled with pride. But, today, after a very long time, there is no trace of the king, Ramesses.

This tells us that we should never be boastful, egoistic or feel proud of ourselves. We all have limited time in this mortal world. We should not live our lives for earning name and fame. These are unattainable. The more we earn them, even more, we desire. On the contrary, we should live a generous and humble life, full of compassion and love.

Analysis

‘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 with the sestet, by gradually replacing old rhymes with new ones in the form ABABACDC EDEFEF.

This sonnet is probably Shelley’s most famous poem. It is devoted to a single metaphor: the shattered, ruined statue in the desert wasteland, with its arrogant, passionate face and monomaniacal inscription. The king’s proud boast, works and civilization, all has been turned to dust by the impersonal, indiscriminate, destructive power of history. The ruined statue is now merely a monument to the insignificance of human beings to the passage of time.

For Shelley, Mont Blanc—the highest peak in the Alps—represents the eternal power of nature, and the West Wind, the power of nature and of the imagination inspired by nature. Unlike Mont Blanc, the West Wind is active and dynamic in poems, such as “Ode to the West Wind.”

The statue of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II, or Ozymandias, symbolizes political tyranny. The broken monument also represents the decay of civilization and culture: the statue is, after all, a human construction, a piece of art made by a creator, and now it—and its creator—have been destroyed, as all living things are eventually destroyed.