In 1817 Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote “Ozymandias,” perhaps the greatest of his short poems, when he and his banker friend Horace Smith sat down to compose dueling sonnets on a passage from the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus. The passage concerned Rameses II, the Egyptian pharaoh who squared off against Moses in Exodus. A massive statue glorifying him proclaimed on its pedestal that he was the “king of kings.” The poets used this phrase and called the ancient pharaoh, whose statue lay in ruins, Ozymandias.
Horace Smith’s “Ozymandias” has some fine lines about a hunter in a future age beholding “some fragment huge” in the wilderness “where London once stood.” But genius went into Shelley’s poem:
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.”
One reason “Ozymandias” is so often anthologized is that it conveys a message dear to poets. Time mocks emperors, particularly boastful ones. The sculptor’s “hand that mocked” is a brilliant pun, for the word “mocked” in 1817 signified not only ridicule but also imitation, as in painting from a model.
Fragments fascinate us, because they bear witness to the devastation of time.
Shakespeare’s sonnet #55 argues in favor of poetry, which shall outlive “the gilded monuments/ Of princes,” because marble and stone are inevitably “besmear’d with sluttish time,” while language, being immaterial, can theoretically live forever. In “Ozymandias,” Shelley, the brash idealist, argues against tyranny itself – “the frown, / And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command” – in the course of presenting the evidence that time defeats despots with their monumental vanity.
An unusual rhyme scheme, with three rhymes occurring three times each, contributes to the power of “Ozymandias.” But the magnificence of the poem’s conclusion goes beyond rhetoric. The disjunction between “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” and the curt sentence that follows, “Nothing beside remains,” is a breathtaking example of how a poet can use the line-break as a meaning-making mechanism.
The phrase “colossal wreck,” a near oxymoron, is as landlocked in the poem’s last three lines as the ruined statue in the endless desert. The alliteration – “boundless and bare, / The lone and level sands stretch far away” – smoothly conveys a sense of the vast continuous distance covered in that “stretch.” The image is haunting, as is the framing device that Shelley employs. We are left wondering about the mysterious “traveler from an antique land” who is said to be the author of the poem.
“The New Colossus” (1883), Emma Lazarus’s stirring sonnet about the Statue of Liberty, borrows a rhyme from “Ozymandias” (stand, land, command) and invites us to read it as a rejoinder to Shelley’s sonnet. The statue in Lazarus' poem is a replacement for the Colossus of Rhodes, “the brazen giant of Greek fame.” The great bronze monument to the sun god, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, stood in the harbor of Rhodes. (It crumbled in an earthquake in 226 BC.) Not as a warrior with “conquering limbs” but as a woman with "mild eyes" and "silent lips," the new colossus will stand as tall as the old, honoring not a god but an ideal that will make it a wonder of the modern world. Welcoming immigrants and refugees, the legend in Lazarus' poem could be construed as the opposite of a tyrant's imperial vanity:
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she,
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore;
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.
— David Lehman