Ozymandias

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1818

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

The Transience of Tyranny

Throughout his career, Shelley dedicated a substantial amount of energy to criticizing tyranny, both in his literary works and his personal life. The most important theme in “Ozymandias” is the ephemerality of power and fame. Shelley does not contest that Ozymandias’s fame and power were real when he was alive; rather, he highlights the fact that they were fleeting. All power is temporary, no matter how rich, angry, or forceful the ruler.

For a staunch republican like Shelley, Pharaonic Egypt was a potent symbol of the fall of monarchical power. One of the longest-lived civilizations on earth, Egypt’s monuments, ravaged by time, were being seen for the first time in English society in Shelley’s day. While the remains of the Ramses statue had not yet arrived at the British Museum, its discovery by archaeologists was announced earlier that year in 1817.

For Shelley, these monuments embodied a once-great empire laid low. The poem’s subject, Ramses II, was known especially for his military conquests and many public works projects. He might even be the tyrannical pharaoh referred to in the Bible’s Book of Exodus, though it is unclear if Shelley would have been aware of this connection. It is likely that the poet had a more contemporary symbol of imperialism in mind: Napoleon Bonaparte. The French military leader was imprisoned on the island of Saint Helena at the time of the poem’s composition, and his 1815 fall at Waterloo was still in recent memory. There were good reasons for Shelley to associate Napoleon with Egypt: Napoleon had invaded it in 1798, and it was in no small part due to this campaign that Egyptian artifacts were being imported to Europe in the first place. In taking jabs at Ozymandias, perhaps Shelley was also making a point about Napoleon’s downfall.

The Triumph of Art

The primary conflict in the poem is between Ozymandias and time, but no less important is the standoff between the pharaoh and his talented, unnamed sculptor. While Ozymandias’s works are lost, the artist’s remains. Its realistic depiction of the king’s “passions”—his coldness, cruelty, and disdain for others—also amplifies the artist’s voice over the king’s. Before Ozymandias “speaks,” we already know exactly who he is from the sculpture. His words are almost irrelevant. It is the artist’s narrative of the man that draws the eye, and the artist’s vision that survives—not Ozymandias’s. The traveler looks to the broken statue first, long before noticing the pedestal.

Art, Shelley suggests, has special insight into the reality of a person, and a special power to convey that reality in an engaging and genuine way. Interestingly, though, the poet does not suggest that art is eternal. Even the sculptor’s depiction of the pharaoh will soon be buried. The poem ends, then, on a somewhat bleak note. For Shelley, everything—even art and poetry—is subject to the erosive power of time.

Nature’s Relationship with Man

The statue of the poem’s title is made of stone, a natural material, and the forces that have brought down the statue are integral parts of nature: gravity, wind, the passage of time. The poem depicts a unique interaction between the natural environment and its human residents, demonstrating that while nature can offer man opportunities for greatness, it always has the potential to overpower man, no matter how great any individual may become.

The poem begins with the image of enormous “legs of stone” (Line 2) standing on a shifting foundation of sand, separated from the statue’s head, which lies nearby, “[h]alf sunk” (Line 4) in the desert. The stone statue, in its toppled state, invites the reader to imagine how it might have appeared in its original condition; as well, the reader has the opportunity to marvel at the ancient technologies involved in the creation of such an enormous statue. Though the statue celebrates its subject, the pharaoh, it also celebrates the individuals who overcame forces of nature to carve the heavy stone into the desired shape and then move the large stone pieces into position. In its original state, the statue was a testimony to man’s ability to manipulate nature as well as a monument to one individual’s power.

By contrast, in its current ruined state, the statue suggests that man’s efforts to control and use nature, while initially impressive, are ultimately futile. The builders’ success is temporary as no manmade statue can withstand the forces of nature in perpetuity. The final line of the poem asserts this point with the image of “lone and level sands [that] stretch far away” (Line 14); the last image the reader is left with is one of limitless nature, the infinite quality suggestive of an all-powerful, unconquerable force. Set against this formidable landscape of sand and wind, the remnants of the monument appear destined to disappear completely, as the stone material gradually disintegrates, returning the statue to the natural world from which it originated.