Ozymandias

In the 19th century Britain became gripped by Egyptomania. Since 1798, when Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt kicked off a series of expeditions that scoured the country for antiquities, European interest in ancient Egyptian history had soared. Many plundered artifacts ended up in London’s British Museum. Among these was a colossal granite bust of a pharaoh that inspired English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley to write “Ozymandias,” a sonnet that is considered his finest poem and one of the greatest pieces of Romantic literature. Published on January 11, 1818, in The Examiner, the poem offers an ironic—and enduring—commentary on the fleeting nature of power.

The poem and its meaning

Shelley’s sonnet tells of a ruined statue of Ozymandias, the Greek name for Ramses II of Egypt, who reigned in the 13th century bce. The speaker relates an encounter with “a traveller from an antique land,” who in turn describes a massive but “trunkless” statue standing in the desert beside a “shattered visage” marked by a “frown / And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command.” On the pedestal is inscribed, “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Yet around the statue, “Nothing beside remains.” Beyond it, “The lone and level sands stretch far away.” The ruler’s empire has been vanquished by time.

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.

A notable irony of the poem is its portrayal of both art and empire as being vulnerable to the ravages of time. After all, most of the sculptor’s efforts have been reduced to rubble. Almost all that remains of the statue is Ozymandias’s sneer, which tells the reader as much about the artist’s view of power as it does about Ozymandias’s personality and, likely, his tyrannical rule. Nevertheless, it is the artist’s perspective (including Shelley’s) that has endured.

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A Study of Poetry

The inspiration: Ramses II

The giant pharaoh’s bust that inspired Shelley’s poem is that of Ramses II, a long-reigning king of ancient Egypt’s 19th dynasty who was known for his extensive building campaign. Among his projects was the Ramesseum, a funerary temple on the west bank of the Nile at Thebes, from where the statue was taken. Originally, the bust was part of a seated figure of Ramses that stood 23 feet (7 meters) tall and weighed more than 20 tons. The bust alone measures more than 8 feet (2.5 meters) tall and 6.5 feet (2 meters) wide and weighs about 7 tons.

Found half-buried in the sand during Napoleon’s expedition, the fragment was excavated in 1816 by a crew led by Giovanni Battista Belzoni, a former circus strongman who had performed as “the Patagonian Samson.” The piece was dragged on wooden sledges to the banks of the Nile and shipped by barge to Cairo, then Alexandria, and finally London, where it arrived in 1818—after Shelley’s poem was published. However, its long and arduous journey from Egypt was reported on in European newspapers. Shelley, whose “Orientalist” 1816 poem Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude proves that he was not above Egyptomania, was likely aware of the statue’s discovery and travels, even if he never laid eyes on it.

Shelley’s contest with Horace Smith

The story goes that Shelley wrote “Ozymandias” in a friendly competition with Horace Smith, a poet, novelist, parodist, and stockbroker who had become his financial adviser. (Not many résumés like that in the literary world.) Like Shelley’s sonnet, Smith’s was also titled “Ozymandias” and published in the politically radical Examiner on February 1, 1818. Later, in Smith’s book Amarynthus, the Nympholept (1821), the poem was given the extremely thorough new title of “On a Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below.”

Indeed, both men referenced an inscription (“My name is Ozymandias…”) that was allegedly imprinted on a statue at the Ramesseum, according to the 1st-century-bce Greek historian Diodorus Siculus. Both poems also make the same point about the impermanence of human achievement.

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Yet Shelley’s is the more powerful work, for both poetic and political reasons. For example, his descriptions are more compelling: Whereas Shelley imagines the statue as “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone,” Smith simply calls it “a gigantic Leg.” Moreover, Shelley’s word choices convey multiple meanings. Mocked in the line “The hand that mocked them” not only suggests that the artist has faithfully rendered the king’s appearance (as in a “mock-up” reproduction), but it also implies that the artist duplicated the king’s expression to ridicule him. Indeed, though both poets gave their poems characters (Smith’s has a hunter), only Shelley gave his a stamp of personality—that of a tyrant for Ozymandias and a rebellious artist for the anonymous sculptor.

Shelley’s political message

When it came to speaking truth to power, Shelley knew of what he wrote. Of all the English Romantic writers, he was the most politically radical. In his short lifetime (he drowned at age 29), he rebelled against nearly every existing form of authority. His father had been a member of Parliament, representing the conservative Whig Party, and Shelley openly despised him and everything the party stood for. As a student at Oxford, the young poet had been expelled because of an incident involving his authorship of a pamphlet espousing atheism.

Other ideas and causes he embraced included the French Revolution, Irish independence, political rights for Roman Catholics, vegetarianism, and free love. He rejected the monarchy, religion, war, and commerce. Although he married twice (the second time to Mary Godwin, author of the 1818 novel Frankenstein and the daughter of two freethinking writers whom Shelley admired), his first marriage had not yet been dissolved when he took up with Godwin. He and Godwin had two children before marrying in December 1816, shortly after Shelley’s first wife, Harriet Westbrook, died by suicide. Until his death in 1822, he and Mary Shelley and their children lived a mostly peripatetic life. Two months after publishing “Ozymandias,” they left England permanently for Italy.

Given Shelley’s beliefs, “Ozymandias” is not merely a sonnet about a statue but a political statement by one of English literature’s most radical voices.

“Ozymandias” in popular culture and modern politics

Centuries after its composition, “Ozymandias” continues to resonate. In popular culture it shows up as the name of a scheming villain and billionaire businessman in Watchmen (1986–87), a DC Comics graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. “Ozymandias” is also the title of one of the final episodes of Breaking Bad (2008–13), a crime drama television series by Vince Gilligan. The episode sees the unraveling of a drug empire built by Walter White, a mild-mannered high school chemistry teacher who turns to making and selling methamphetamine to pay for his cancer treatment. Considered one of the greatest episodes in the acclaimed series, it was “teased” with a trailer that features Bryan Cranston (who plays White) reciting Shelley’s poem.

The sonnet’s political message has also remained relevant. In the early 21st century its lines have been quoted to commemorate the destruction of statues of deposed Iraqi Pres. Saddam Hussein in Baghdad in 2003 and former Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 2013–14.