Ozymandias by Shelly summary and analysis and themes

Summary

The speaker recalls having met a traveler “from an antique land,” who told him a story about the ruins of a statue in the desert of his native country. Two vast legs of stone stand without a body, and near them a massive, crumbling stone head lies “half sunk” in the sand. The traveler told the speaker that the frown and “sneer of cold command” on the statue’s face indicate that the sculptor understood well the passions of the statue’s subject, a man who sneered with contempt for those weaker than himself, yet fed his people because of something in his heart (“The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed”). On the pedestal of the statue appear the words: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” But around the decaying ruin of the statue, nothing remains, only the “lone and level sands,” which stretch out around it, far away.

Form

“Ozymandias” is a sonnet, a fourteen-line poem metered in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme is somewhat unusual for a sonnet of this era; it does not fit a conventional Petrarchan pattern, but instead interlinks the octave (a term for the first eight lines of a sonnet) with the sestet (a term for the last six lines), by gradually replacing old rhymes with new ones in the form ABABACDCEDEFEF.

Commentary

This sonnet from 1817 is probably Shelley’s most famous and most anthologized poem—which is somewhat strange, considering that it is in many ways an atypical poem for Shelley, and that it touches little upon the most important themes in his oeuvre at large (beauty, expression, love, imagination). Still, “Ozymandias” is a masterful sonnet. Essentially it is devoted to a single metaphor: the shattered, ruined statue in the desert wasteland, with its arrogant, passionate face and monomaniacal inscription (“Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”). The once-great king’s proud boast has been ironically disproved; Ozymandias’s works have crumbled and disappeared, his civilization is gone, all has been turned to dust by the impersonal, indiscriminate, destructive power of history. The ruined statue is now merely a monument to one man’s hubris, and a powerful statement about the insignificance of human beings to the passage of time. Ozymandias is first and foremost a metaphor for the ephemeral nature of political power, and in that sense the poem is Shelley’s most outstanding political sonnet, trading the specific rage of a poem like “England in 1819” for the crushing impersonal metaphor of the statue. But Ozymandias symbolizes not only political power—the statue can be a metaphor for the pride and hubris of all of humanity, in any of its manifestations. It is significant that all that remains of Ozymandias is a work of art and a group of words; as Shakespeare does in the sonnets, Shelley demonstrates that art and language long outlast the other legacies of power.

Of course, it is Shelley’s brilliant poetic rendering of the story, and not the subject of the story itself, which makes the poem so memorable. Framing the sonnet as a story told to the speaker by “a traveller from an antique land” enables Shelley to add another level of obscurity to Ozymandias’s position with regard to the reader—rather than seeing the statue with our own eyes, so to speak, we hear about it from someone who heard about it from someone who has seen it. Thus the ancient king is rendered even less commanding; the distancing of the narrative serves to undermine his power over us just as completely as has the passage of time. Shelley’s description of the statue works to reconstruct, gradually, the figure of the “king of kings”: first we see merely the “shattered visage,” then the face itself, with its “frown / And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command”; then we are introduced to the figure of the sculptor, and are able to imagine the living man sculpting the living king, whose face wore the expression of the passions now inferable; then we are introduced to the king’s people in the line, “the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.” The kingdom is now imaginatively complete, and we are introduced to the extraordinary, prideful boast of the king: “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” With that, the poet demolishes our imaginary picture of the king, and interposes centuries of ruin between it and us: “ ‘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.”

 الشرح الثاني

In the poem Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley brings out his talent in poetry writing in the way he uses vocabulary to impress the reader. It�s not the story of the poem that makes the poem memorable, but the way the poet brings it out.

The poem is about the remains of a statue of a once powerful pharaoh in Egypt named Ramsses II or Ozymandias. This king was very powerful and was very arrogant. He was too proud of himself and thought that nothing was more superior than he was. The poet describes one of the many statues of Ozymandias. This statue once stood in the middle of the Sahara Desert but now what remains is only a pair of huge legs standing on the sand with a ruined face half sunk in the sand near them. The poet describes the face of the statue as with a domineering expression like the expression Ozymandias had on his face when he was still alive. The message on the statue said:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Which means you can never be powerful as I am. At last we come to know that even if this pharaoh was once very powerful he still dies like us normal humans do and nothing of him is left except a ruined statue in the middle of nowhere!

The poem consists of an octave and a sestet. In the octave the sense of power is felt while in the sestet we become aware that the works of mankind don�t last and that we all have to die � whether we�re a king of kings or a normal citizen. The poet uses words like �Two vast and trunkless legs of stone" to show us that before the statue got ruined it was quite a big statue. When describing the statue as �half sunk� and �shattered� in the sand we get a clear picture of two huge legs in the middle of a desert with its face near them in the sand. Shelley brings out the emotions on the statue�s face by describing the �frown� and �wrinkled lip� that can be seen although the statue is broken, the �sneer of cold command� makes you imagine someone which thinks that no one can be above him as in fact was Ramsses II. When the poet tells us that the emotions of the statue are still there, this implies that although nothing of the material things remain, you will still be remembered for the man you were � After Ozymandias died he was still remembered as a cold and arrogant person who thought was the best. In the poet�s opinion the sculptor who made this statue couldn�t describe Ramsses II any better � �well those passions read�. He finishes off his poem by saying that:

"Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Which means that only a ruined statue in the middle of nowhere is left of a once very powerful king!

All these are examples of how Percy Shelley manages to make us imagine all that he wants us to. In my opinion, the great talent of this poet cannot be explained!

الشرح الثالث

The poem’s narrator presents the reader with a stunning vision of the tomb of Ozymandias, another name for Rameses II, King of Egypt during the 13th century B.C. Shelley emphasizes that to a modern viewer this tomb tells quite a different tale than that which Ozymandias had hoped it would. The king evidently commissioned a sculptor to create an enormous sphinx to represent his enduring power, but the traveler comes across only a broken heap of stones ravaged by time.

Enough of the original monument exists to allow Shelley a moment of triumph over the thwarted plans of the ruler. The face of Ozymandias is still recognizable, but it is “shattered,” and, though his “sneer of cold command” persists, it is obvious that he no longer commands anyone or anything. The vaunting words carved into the stone pedestal can still be read: “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Yet he is to be pitied, if not disdained, rather than held in awe and fear: The broken-down tomb is set in a vast wasteland of sand, perhaps Shelley’s way of suggesting that all tyrants ultimately end up in the only kind of kingdom they deserve, a barren desert.

Shelley’s sonnet, however, would not be the great poem it surely is if it were only a bit of political satire. The irony of “Ozymandias” cuts much deeper as the reader realizes that the forces of mortality and mutability, described brilliantly in the concluding lines, will erode and destroy all our lives. There is a special justice in the way tyrants are subject to time, but all humans face death and decay. The poem remains primarily an ironic and compelling critique of Ozymandias and other rulers like him, but it is also a striking meditation on time-bound humanity: the traveler in the ancient land, the sculptor-artist who fashioned the tomb, and the reader of the poem, no less than Ozymandias, inhabit a world that is “boundless and bare.”

الشرح الرابع

Imagine this scenario: three English men sitting around a table at a drunken party. The men bet each other that each of them could come up with the best poem in the alotted time of fifteen minutes. The poem's topic was Egypt. The poem Ozymandias was the response of Percy Bysshe Shelley to the bet.

The first vital point to note is that the poem is an Italian sonnet in a traditional 14 line, 8-6, set-up with iambic pentameter. It encapsulates a great story about Ramses, the past king of Egypt. 

The poem was written around 1800 and the fact that it was written in an "antique land" (1) illustrates that the author was attempting to distance himself from Ramses, indicating the faded view of the past king Ozymandias.

Great opposition, irony and sarcasm appears when it is said, "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains." This negative connotation shows that there once was a vast kingdom, but now that kingdom has disappeared. Neither property nor the king himself is immortal, the sonnet indicates. 

When it is said that the "lone and level sands stretch far away" (13-14), the reader realizes that perhaps the sand is more vast now than the empire is. 

Finally, when breaking down the word "Ozymandas" in the original greek, we realize that the kingdom no longer exists. Ozy comes from the Greek "ozium," which means to breath, or air. Mandias comes from the Greek "mandate," which means to rule.

Hence, Ozymandias is simply a "ruler of air" or a "ruler of nothing". It is then obvious that the King of Kings spoken of in the poem is actually nature itself. Nature never disappears and nature represents the immortality not represented by the Ramses or any other individual or possession

الشرح الخامس

Cohesion Analysis a. “Ozymandias”

In this poem, Shelley employs four exophoric references (I, Ozymandias, the pedestal, ye mighty). My readings are somewhat controversial, but it seems like in the first two cases, these appellations do not refer to anything in the poem, and serve to ground it in external reality. Ozymandias is a documented historical figure, and the use of that name throughout the poem seems to refer to the existing historical record in a specific way. The definite article can be read as endophoric, but it also seems to refer outside the text in a strong way: it seems to refer to our knowledge of the conventions of monumental statuary. We are supposed to know that the pedestal goes with the visage and legs. The archaic second person is very interesting here because it refers out of the pedestal where it is written, but it also refers out of the text to address itself to the powerful.

Shelley also uses fifteen endophoric personal and demonstrative references in this poem([personal: who—traveler, them—legs, whose—visage, its--visage, them—passions, my—Ozymandias] demonstrative: those--frown those—survive, these—visage/legs, that—hand, that—heart, these—quotation, that—quotation, visage, legs ). Most of these are pretty clear. To return to the definite article discussed above, if we want to read it endophorically, we can imagine it referring back to the visage and the legs; perhaps the best explanation is that can refer out in or in for its sense depending on the intelligence reading the text. Shelley includes a very important ellipsis in line eight(“the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.[them]”) that contributes to the ambiguity which I will discuss in the section on verbs below. There are five conjunctive devices used in this poem; two enhancements (near, round) and three extensions( and, which, yet). Shelley creates chains of semantic near-equivalents in this poem( I will discuss this further in the word choice section), in addition to using repetition(sand—sand, and—and, repetition of the device of quotation) to create cohesion at the lexical level. His repetition of the device of quotation, where he begins by quoting a traveler, who in turn quotes the pedestal, will be important to the discussion of perspective below. 

Perspective Analysisa. “Ozymandias”

In this poem, Shelley employs a complex perspective. The first word in the poem is “I” which suggests a first-person perspective; however, the “I” only exists to set before the reader a quotation from another speaker, who, in his turn sets before the reader a quotation from a pedestal. This puts us at a double distance from Ozymandias. This plays into the general tone of the poem: the subject is a long dead king, and the story comes to us at secondhand about a pile of ruins in a desert. This deepens our sense of loss, desolation and futility. The story is hearsay, the statue is shattered, and we do “look on [Ozymandias’] works and despair” because they have come to stand for mutability not permanence. 

Type of Speech Analysis a. “Ozymandias”

This is a difficult poem to comment on because of a complex textual history. If we look to one edition, we find quotation marks enclosing all of the speech of the traveler; however, if we look at another, we find only the writing that appears on the pedestal set off in inverted commas. Due to the absence of a proper name to whom the quotation should be attributed in the poem, it is safe to say that we are looking at indirect discourse. This ties in with my remarks on perspective: there is a distancing effect that arises from the fact that there is information loss in history. Shelley seems to be intimating that history itself is indirect discourse, that it speaks to us without solid references, subject to information loss, and hearsay. 

Verb Analysis a. “Ozymandias”

“Ozymandias” uses fifteen verbs all of which are in the active voice. Six of these verbs are transitive (met, said, tell, read, survive, mocked). Five of these verbs are clearly intransitive (stand, lies, look, despair, stretch). There are two clear instances of linking verbs(appear,remains) and one example of the verb ‘to be.’ There is also one example of a verb which appears as intransitive due to an ellipsis (fed). Usually, ‘to feed’ is a transitive verb in English requiring a subject and an object; however, in this poem—probably for metrical reasons—Shelley elided the third person object pronoun from line eight. Line eight presents ambiguity because of the fact that ‘to survive’ can be either transitive or intransitive in English. The first time we read the poem, we may be led to believe, as I was, that it is used intransitively in line seven, but on a second reading, it should become clear that it is transitive, taking “the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed” as object. In addition, Shelley employs the imperative mood in lines eleven and twelve. This serves to intensify the irony to be discussed in the word choice section. 

Diction and Word Choice Analysis a. “Ozymandias”

The most important choice that Shelley made in this area was his translation of Diodorus Siculus’ rendering of the inscription mentioned in lines eleven and twelve(RPO, notes). This choice of translation makes possible the irony of the imperative statement. The original translation said: “"King of Kings am I, Osymandias. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works." This is clearly very different from “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:/Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.” In order for the irony to work, we need line twelve to appear exactly as it does: first, the mighty can either despair of ever matching Ozymandias, or can feel despair in the face of the ruins that are all that remain of his greatness second, the imperative force of the inscription is ironically juxtaposed with the Kink of kings’ impotence when faced with the desert sands.

In addition, throughout this poem Shelley creates strings of words that share semantic features. There seem to be three discernible strings: Largeness Words (vast-colossal)Breakage Words (trunkless-shattered-sunk-decay-wreck-bare) and Expression Words (frown-wrinkled lip-sneer). By the end of the poem, these three strings are joined in opposition to the sand, which is described as boundless and level. This seems to be an opposition between grand stateliness, ruination, misery on the one hand, and democratic anonymity on the other. 

Metaphor Analysis a. “Ozymandias”

There seems to be one major metaphor, the ruined monument, and a secondary metaphor, the sand. As I have already discussed these above, there is not much left to say except to point to the possibility of reading this entire poem as a metaphor of human experience. It may be read as a metaphor for mutability and impermanence, and the futility of seeking after traditional, stately glories and the approval of authority.

Posted in: Analysis, and, Commentary, line, Metaphor, Ozymandias, poem, poetry, Shelly, Summary, themes, اوزيماندياس, شرح, قصيدة