Poet’s Corner: P.B. Shelley–Ozymandias

6 August 2026

(16 October 2015) Today we introduce another of the younger Romantics, Percy Byshe Shelley, examining his famous “Ozymandias”:

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.”

We remind our readers that this short poem is a quotation from a traveler the poet meets, all but the first line and a half. This traveler had been to Egypt–the ‘antique land’–and had come across the remains of a huge statue, although all that remains standing are the huge legs, broken off before the hips, and on the ground, half-buried in sand, the shattered head. This traveler notices the passions of this statue, still visible in its degraded state, the ‘sneer of cold command’, the look of a tyrant who always got his way. The words on the base tell us who he is, ‘Ozymandias,’ which is another name of Ramses II, the infamous pharaoh who was brought to his knees by Moses. The command to ‘[l]ook on my Works . . . and despair!’, followed the by traveler’s closing comment, that nothing remains but ‘lone and level sands’ as far as the eyes can see, reminds us on several levels of the fact that time conquers all; no matter how powerful, in this case, an emperor of the world’s greatest empire (at that time), time and the mutability of all matter will erase all traces of human existence and civilization. All Ozymandias’s power, all his influence, are now only fragments of stone in an empty land. This notion, of the mutability of all matter, is an idea found throughout Romantic thinking, and heavily influences Shelley, among others. We will continue with more of Shelley’s poetry on Saturday, until then, good reading!