Percy Bysshe Shelley

Sonnet

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. 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

Tricky grammar: 'mocked' means both 'imitated' and 'ridiculed.' The sculptor's hand copied the king's sneer, but also outlasted him—the artist wins.

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Ozymandias

Greek name for Ramesses II, who ruled Egypt 1279-1213 BCE and built more monuments than any other pharaoh. Shelley's using the most monument-obsessed ruler in history.

ye Mighty

The irony pivot: Ozymandias meant 'despair at my greatness,' but now it reads 'despair because even I became sand.' Same words, opposite meaning.

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.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Frame Story Trick

Shelley buries the point in narrative layers: traveller tells narrator about sculptor depicting king. Each layer adds distance from Ozymandias, shrinking him.

The sculptor is the poem's quiet hero. Line 6-7 says he 'well those passions read'—he understood the king's arrogance and stamped it permanently in stone. That word 'stamped' does double work: it means the sculptor imprinted the expression, but also suggests a seal or brand, marking the king as a type. The 'sneer of cold command' survives because the artist was better at his job than the king was at his.

Notice what we never see: the 'works' Ozymandias brags about. No cities, temples, or armies. Just two legs and a shattered face in empty desert. The inscription promises something to look at, but 'Nothing beside remains.' Shelley makes the absence physical—those last two lines are all empty space words: boundless, bare, lone, level, stretch, far, away.

1817 Context

Shelley wrote this during a sonnet competition with his friend Horace Smith (both poems titled 'Ozymandias,' published weeks apart). It's a party trick about empire's end—but 1817 isn't random timing.

Britain just beat Napoleon, the modern king of kings. The British Museum was filling up with looted Egyptian colossal statues, including the seven-ton head of Ramesses II that arrived in 1816. Londoners were lining up to see how the mighty had fallen—but Shelley's making them look in a mirror. Your empire will be sand too.

The poem's a sonnet, the most monument-like poem form—14 lines that last centuries. But Shelley breaks the rules: weird rhyme scheme (ABABA), enjambment across the volta, no clean octave/sestet split. Even the form says: your structures won't hold.