The inscription stands in ironic contrast to the decrepit reality of the statue, however, underscoring the ultimate transience of political power. All that remains of the statue are two “vast” stone legs standing upright and a head half-buried in sand, along with a boastful inscription describing the ruler as the “king of kings” whose mighty achievements invoke awe and despair in all who behold them. “Ozymandias” describes the ruins of an ancient king’s statue in a foreign desert. What does “Ozymandias” convey about the meaning of power? The traveller next describes the words inscribed on the pedestal of the statue, which say: “My name is Ozymandias, the King who rules over even other Kings. Behold what I have built, all you who think of yourselves as powerful, and despair at the magnificence and superiority of my accomplishments.” There is nothing else in the area. Surrounding the remnants of the large statue is a never-ending and barren desert, with empty and flat sands stretching into the distance. The speaker of the poem meets a traveller who came from an ancient land. The traveller describes two large stone legs of a statue, which lack a torso to connect them, and stand upright in the desert. Near the legs, half buried in sand, is the broken face of the statue. The statue’s facial expression-a frown and a wrinkled lip-form a commanding, haughty sneer. The expression shows that the sculptor understood the emotions of the person the statue is based on, and now those emotions live on, carved forever on inanimate stone. In making the face, the sculptor’s skilled hands mocked up a perfect recreation of those feelings and of the heart that fed those feelings (and, in the process, so perfectly conveyed the subject’s cruelty that the statue itself seems to be mocking its subject). Round the decayġ3Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bareġ4The lone and level sands stretch far away.” Near them, on the sand,ĤHalf sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,ĥAnd wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,ĦTell that its sculptor well those passions readħWhich yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,ĨThe hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed ĩAnd on the pedestal, these words appear:ġ1Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!ġ2Nothing beside remains. Although the poem is a 14-line sonnet, it breaks from the typical sonnet tradition in both its form and rhyme scheme, a tactic that reveals Shelley’s interest in challenging conventions, both political and poetic.ĢWho said-“Two vast and trunkless legs of stoneģStand in the desert. In “Ozymandias,” Shelley describes a crumbling statue of Ozymandias as a way to portray the transience of political power and to praise art’s power of preserving the past. The title of “Ozymandias” refers to an alternate name of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II. Shelley wrote “Ozymandias” in 1817 as part of a poetry contest with a friend, and had it published in The Examiner in 1818 under the pen name Glirastes. “Ozymandias” is a sonnet written by the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.
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