• 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 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.'
The speaker describes a meeting with someone who has traveled to a
place where ancient civilizations once existed. We know from the title
that he’s talking about Egypt. The traveler told the speaker a story
about an old, fragmented statue in the middle of the desert. The statue
is broken apart, but he can still make out the face of a person. The face
looks stern and powerful, like a ruler. The sculptor did a good job at
expressing the ruler’s personality. The ruler was a wicked guy, but he
took care of his people.
On the pedestal near the face, the traveler reads an inscription in which
the ruler Ozymandias tells anyone who might happen to pass by,
basically, “Look around and see how awesome I am!” But there is no
other evidence of his awesomeness in the vicinity of his giant, broken
statue. There is just a lot of sand, as far as the eye can see. The traveler
ends his story.
The poem “Ozymandias” by P.B. Shelley tells the partial story of a once mighty king
whose works are now in waste. The poet paints a picture of a once powerful king
whose kingdom no longer exists. Shelley makes use of contrasting imagery to show
that Time is the conqueror of all.
The poem’s one stanza is sufficient to sum up the remains of Ozymandias’ life, and
from the very beginning the poet distances himself from the King. Not even able to
tell the forgotten story himself, the narrator must rely on a “traveller from an antique
land” (line 1). The word “antique” being very important because it brings Time into
the mind of the reader very early. The land does not have to be far away, just very old.
The first four lines of the poem paint the picture where the remains of Ozymandias’
kingdom lie. The traveler starts out by describing a human figure made of stone in
the desert. The only thing remaining is the two “vast and trunkless legs of stone” (line
2). The legs being “vast” yet “trunkless” are two contrasting images. The statue that
was there was a huge, important man no longer stands except for two legs. The legs
are in a desert, giving an image of a “vast”, barren land with just the remains of this
statue.
Then the traveler zooms in closer and says that near the statue a head (visage) lies,
half buried in the sand. This offers our most intimate glimpse at the fallen king. A
contrast is set up between “shattered” and “visage” as one describes something in
pieces, while that something was once the head of a statue. The word visage gives an
elegant connotation to the image. His face is one of power, yet it is not described as a
beautiful face. There is a “wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command” (line 5). On line
6, this expression is described as one of “passion,” giving us another contrast.
Passions are usually thought of as “warm” not as a cold sneer. Yet, only this passion
survived through time as a picture of the fallen king. This brings us to another
contrast between “survive” and “lifeless.” Survival means to live on, but the only part
of Ozymandias that lives on is his sneering statue. “The hand that mocked them, and
the heart that fed” is still another contrast of the king. It is hard to imagine the king
being described as a “heart that fed” when all that we see is a cold sneer, that is
almost mocking.
After this, the traveler zooms back out a bit, showing us the words on the statue’s
pedestal:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
The inscription has an ironic meaning to it. When King Ozymandias wrote the
inscription, he meant to fear him because of all his “mighty works,” but Time, the true
King of Kings, has brought a different meaning to the inscription. The Mighty should
not fear Ozymandias, but they should fear the effects of Time, as they can see from
the bare remains surrounding the statue. Just as Ozymandias’ works were forgotten
with Time, everyone else shall face the same fate, no matter what their might. The
traveler says that nothing remains but the crumbling statue, and that “Round the
decay/ Of that colossal Wreck” nothing remains but sand (lines 12-14). The
contrasting image of a “colossal Wreck” serves the purpose of comparing what was
before and what remains.
The word “boundless” describes the sand surrounding the statue, but also, it
describes Time. Time knows no bounds – all are subject to time. Ozymandias’
kingdom had a limit on it, and after it was all said and done, his kingdom now consists
of a single, “decaying” statue, “lone” on the sand, while Time’s kingdom is
“boundless.” The limit on Ozymandias’ Kingdom and the boundlessness of Time’s is
the most significant contrast in the poem, for it contains the theme of the poem.
LAND
STONE
READ
THINGS
APPEAR
DECAY
-
SAND
FROWN
FED
KINGS
DESPAIR
AWAY
The rhyme scheme of the poem is :
ababacdcedefef
 Alliteration
Repetition of a Sound
•Two vast and trunkless legs
•cold command
•The hand that mocked 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)
 Synecdoche
Substitution of a part to stand for the whole, or the whole to stand for a part
•The hand that mock'd them
1. antique: Ancient.
2. desert: Sahara.
3. visage: Face.
4. well . . . read: The sculptor skillfully interpreted the king's feelings.
5. survive: The Pharaoh's passions (as indicated by the sneer and the frown) survive in
the sculpted image.
6. stamped: sculpted, chiseled.
7. hand . . . them: Hand of the sculptor, who mocked the Pharaoh's passions by
chiseling them into the stone.
8. heart . . . Fed: The pharaoh's feelings (heart) fed the sculptor's creativity.
9. Look . . . despair: The pharaoh says his works are so magnificent that any attempts
to equal or surpass their excellence will end only in despair.
10. Nothing else remains at the site of sculpture: The pharaoh's boasts are now as
empty as the empty and boundless desert surrounding the decaying statue..
Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets, who was born on 4
August 1792 in Field Palace,Horsham,England, and is critically regarded among the finest
lyric poets in the English language. Shelley was famous for his association with John Keats
and Lord Byron. The novelist Mary Shelley was his second wife.
He is most famous for such classic anthology verse works as
Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, and The
Masque of Anarchy, which are among the most popular and
critically acclaimed poems in the English language. His major
works, however, are long visionary poems which included Queen
Mab (later reworked as The Daemon of the World), Alastor, The
Revolt of Islam, Adonaïs, and the unfinished work The Triumph
of Life. The Cenci (1819) and Prometheus Unbound (1820) were
dramatic plays in five and four acts respectively. Although he has
typically been figured as a "reluctant dramatist" he was
passionate about the theatre, and his plays continue to be
performed today. He wrote the Gothic novels Zastrozzi (1810)
and St. Irvyne (1811) and the short prose works "The Assassins" (1814), "The Coliseum"
(1817) and "Una Favola" (1819). In 2008, he was credited as the co-author of the novel
Frankenstein (1818) in a new edition by the Bodleian Library in Oxford and Random
House in the U.S. entitled The Original Frankenstein edited by Charles E. Robinson.
Shelley's unconventional life and uncompromising idealism, combined
with his strong disapproving voice, made him an authoritative and
much-denigrated figure during his life and afterward. Shelley never
lived to see the extent of his success and influence. Some of his works
were published, but they were often suppressed upon publication.
He became an idol of the next three or even four generations of poets,
including the important Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite poets. He was
admired by Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Hardy, George Bernard
Shaw, Bertrand Russell, William Butler Yeats, Upton Sinclair and Isadora
Duncan. Henry David Thoreau's civil disobedience and Mohandas
Karamchand Gandhi's passive resistance were apparently influenced
and inspired by Shelley's nonviolence in protest and political action,
although Gandhi fails to include him in his list of mentors.