Today’s Poem: Ozymandias

Shelley’s fallen Colossus and his immortal boast

Charlie Phillips, The Ozymandias Colossus (Wikimedia Commons)

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Ozymandias

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

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.”

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If you struggle to memorize whole poems, as some of us do, it’s still efficacious to remember bits and pieces, to treasure up and produce at need. Into every life, at some time or other, will surely fall the occasion to say to someone else, “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair.” 

This is, after all, the one line in “Ozymandias,” by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), that anyone can quote without trying. The rest of the sonnet, with its innovative rhyme scheme — ababacdcedefef  — whose first six lines almost recall the Arabic-reminiscent sestain that opens Byron’s “She Walks in Beauty,” serves as a setting for that ironic boast.

As the poem begins, a “traveller from an antique land” turns up, as a mechanism for reporting the news from the desert. The “lone and level sands stretch far away” into a vanishing distance at the end. In between, the stone remains of “Ozymandias, King of Kings,” his name intended as a byword for immortality, lie scattered beneath the pitiless sun.

Having looked on it all, the “traveller” has not despaired. Instead he has brought back that line, a souvenir, the one enduring work of Ozymandias, for posterity to remember and repeat. We know that our works, too, are kingdoms built on sand. And sometimes it’s good to quote poetry to our friends, to remind them. 

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