He has used ‘frown’, ‘wrinkled up’ and ‘sneer of cold command’ to give us an impression that the subject of the statue was an angry, commanding and often upset man. The traveller goes on to describe that the face of the statue lying on the sand had the expressions still visible and identifiable of the mighty ruler Ozymandias.
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read It’s perhaps just the natural process of decay with time.Īnd wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, But we don’t really know what exactly happened to that statue. The shattered head denotes that the whole statue is destroyed. visage means a face but it implies a head here. Near the standing legs he also came across the broken head (shattered visage) of the statue that was partially buried in the sand. The desert indicates that it was ancient Egypt. ‘Trunkless’ suggests that the legs were standing there without the upper body or the torso. The traveller told the narrator that he saw two huge stone-legs of a statue in the middle of a desert. It is suggestive of how pride and glory of power fade away with time. Some critics opine that this framing has helped the poet add another level of obscurity to Ozymandias’s position in people’s mind. So, it’s a story within a story, a narrative within a narrative. So, the traveller was from a place with an ancient history like Rome, Greece or ancient Egypt. The traveller told him his story of the ruins of a giant statue that he had come across. The speaker of the poem once met a traveler from ‘an antique land’. Clearly, the poet has experimented with the form and rhyme scheme of the sonnet.
The octave (first eight lines of a sonnet) and the sestet (last six-line stanza of a sonnet) are linked together. The rhyme scheme ABABACDCEDEFEF is uncommon for a sonnet. The sonnet is in Iambic pentameter with some irregularities. So, Diodorus’s work served as the source of the poem. Actually this sonnet got its content from the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus who wrote about a massive Egyptian statue quoting the inscription under it. But, then it gets into a frame of reported speech from another man, ‘a traveller from an antique land’, whom the speaker met. The poem is a narrative poem where the speaker starts it with ‘I’, making it look like a first person narrative.
Wikipedia has a side by side comparison of the two poems. It is worth mentioning here that Shelley wrote this poem in competition with his friend Horace Smith who primarily gave his poem the same name ‘Ozymandias’ and published that in the same magazine. Though the subject of the sonnet is not a typical one for Shelley’s poetry, it has been a popular poem and has influenced many other literary creations since its publication. So the poet here highlights the mortality and inevitable decline of so-called mighty leaders and their false pride in contrary to the immortality of creative works. So, what remains alive is the sculptor’s work of art.
But the head of the statue which is half-sunk in the sand, still expresses the passions of the ruler. The king once enjoyed his commanding power, but time has brought its decay. Advertisementsīut, the poem ironically presents a great message about the transitory (short-lived) existence of the boastful might of the ruler. It’s no surprise that the poem is named after him. The sonnet is about the ruins of a statue of Ozymandias. In antiquity, Ozymandias was a Greek name for the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II, who ruled from 1279 BCE to 1213 BCE. The next year, it got a place in Shelley’s collection Rosalind and Helen, A Modern Eclogue with Other Poems (1819). It is a sonnet, first published in The Examiner in 1818. Ozymandias is one of the most anthologized poems written by the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.
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