Ozymandias' Daunting Warning on Power and Glory

The Poem depicting the downfall of Ozymandias, King of all Kings.

Ozymandias was and still is one of the most prominent pieces of European literature, masterfully describing political power, human hubris, and many other manifestations. Percy Bysshe Shelly's powerful poem viewed through the lenses of modern day people, makes us sit at the edge of our seats and make us think of how an empire’s fame and glory can turn to dust and debris in a matter of years.

Long Story Short

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born on August 4th, 1792, in Sussex, England. His father. Sir Timothy Shelley, was a baronet of Castle Goring, while his mother was the daughter of a successful butcher. He had four younger sisters and one very young brother. As a child, he attended a day school at Warnham Church, where he exhibited an impressive memory and a liking to languages. At age ten, he attended the Syon House Academy of Brentford with his cousin Thomas Medwin. As a pupil, Percy was often subject to bullying, to which he responded with violence. He also gained a liking towards science, which fueled his interest in mystery and the supernatural.

Two years later, Shelley attended Eton College, where he was severely bullied, as a result of his refusal to take part in fagging, where younger students acted as personal servants to the elder boys. As he grew older, so did his interest in the occult. He gave an electric shock to his master once and blew up a tree stump with gunpowder in an attempt to raise spirits with a ritual. In his last year at the college, he published his first novel, “Zastrozzi”.

Soon, Shelley went to Oxford to complete his studies, and published the gothic novel “St. Irvine; or, The Rosicrucian: A Romance”, in the year 1811. He was later expelled from Oxford because he wrote an atheist piece. Along with that, Shelley published a series of anonymous political poems.

Soon after, Percy married his classmate Harriet Westbrook, and due to the fact that this marriage was an elopement they had little to no money and were surviving on borrowed money. A few years later, Shelley’s debt mounted after an unsuccessful financial settlement with his father. A little while after Harriet gave birth to their daughter Eliza, the couple's relationship quickly deteriorated. Shelley was alone for the next few months until he eloped with Mary Godwin, the future author of the groundbreaking book Frankenstein. Shortly after marrying Mary, Harriet Westbrook committed suicide. To make things worse, his relationship with Mary quickly deteriorated, although he gained a good share of his grandfather’s 25 million dollars (inflation-adjusted) inheritance around the same time.

It was clear that Percy had an affair with Mary’s step-sister Claire, and that Mary was having an affair with Percy’s friend and co-author, T.J. Hogg. Soon, Claire initiated a relationship with the prolific and prominent poet George Gordon, better known as Lord Byron. This introduced Shelley to Byron, and they soon admired each others’ poetry and went on boating trips together. Soon Byron’s relationship with Shelley was strained when he came to know that Claire was pregnant with Shelley’s son. Since then, they grew to become more rivals than friends. Messed up? For sure.

Over the next few years, the Shelley family moved to many different homes in fear of tyranny or war, (Percy was a pacifist through and through) and in this period, Mary gave birth to a boy, Percy Florence Shelley. Around Christmas 1817, Ozymandias was published in a friendly sonnet competition with his friend Horace Smith, and over the next few years, Percy would be the most prolific, publishing Julian and Maddalo, Prometheus Unbound, and The Cenci.

Even though he published many revolutionary poems in his lifetime, it was to no avail. Shelley wrote poems primarily for himself, receiving no major interest from the public, while fine poets that we today group Shelley with, such as Lord Byron, sold approximately 10,000 copies of his poetry every day.

On July 1st, 1822, Shelley sailed on the Don Juan to make arrangements for a new journal, “The Liberal.” Sadly, the Don Juan and its inexperienced crew faced a storm and their boat succumbed to the waves. Ten days after the sinking, Shelley’s badly decomposed body came back to shore, where he was given a proper funeral. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ashes were buried in the Protestant Cemetery of Rome, where he still lies today.

The Writing

Because I elaborate the writing, I must explain the context of this piece. Percy Shelley wrote this poem during the reign of King George the Third, a king who was incessantly conquering territories during his time, and this poem was meant to be a critique of his non-pacifist ways. It is important to note that Shelley was a second-generation Romantic Poet, which meant he used foreign areas as the setting of his poetry to separate himself from first-generation Romantic Poets who essentially “Went out of business.” The setting he used in this piece was the statue of Ramesses the Second. Now, the analysis.

The first few verses go:

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert…

This tells us that a person met a traveler who spoke to the person, talking about how he saw two vast legs without an upper half standing in the desert, almost as if he was asking a question. He then goes on:

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;

The traveler recollects what he saw about the head of this broken statue lying on the sand, a “shattered visage” referring to its face, with a gruesome and intimidating frown, wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command. The artist is then, in a way, praised for his skill in making the statue so lifelike and scary. Shortly after, he continues:

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.”

The words sound powerful, etched in stone, Ozymandias himself telling us to look at his powerful empire, and “despair”, trying to make us realize that we could never recreate such a powerful empire. The traveler, reading this, looks around. He sees nothing, the “colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.”

And so, the poem ends with a melancholy note of lost glory.

The Theme

One theme of Ozymandias is that while empires can fade away, art cannot. Through every war and every storm, the statue prevailed, whether it be in one piece or not.

Another theme of Ozymandias warns us that enough power can illusion a person into the idea that they are all powerful and that their power cannot be lost. Shelley tells us to see through the mask of power and wealth, so that we do not share the fate of the once great king Ozymandias.

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Disclaimer: Remember, this is just my opinion and what I think of a piece after gathering research and writing it down.

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