Ozymandias by Shelley: The futility of power? Analysis-the importance of metonymy.

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”.

There is something rather surreal about the imagery in this poem. I am not particularly visual and yet the combination oft he ‘trunkless legs of stone’ and the ‘lone and level sands’ conjures up something between Salvador Dali and Monty Python for me.  It is this juxtaposition between the indifferent timelessness of the natural world with the futile architecture of ambition -that make the poem so arresting. We stop as readers and spectate on this ancient debris testifying to the accidental  and most transitory nature of power.  It is another illustration of the death bed revelation. And what we wonder would we have written beneath our own severed head? How far would our strivings stretch before us, mocking and all too aware of our futility and insignficance?

What also is revealed here in this ironic sonnet through the fragmentation of the original mighty ‘body’ of Ozymandias? Fragmentation underlines the incoherence of Ozymandias’ identity and values. Dictatorship perhaps had already ‘dismembered’ his human self, so that this monument to his power and ostensible immortaility highlights his inhumanity and personal estrangement from his community. 

The broken nature of Ozymandias’ s statue is suggestive of futility: the alienation communicated through the ‘bits’ of the once great sculpture, shows how the  broken parts of Ozymandias’s image, are metonymical aspects of the lost original(ie human Pharoah)  who is not even dust anymore.  In other words, that Shelley gives representation to the ‘parts’ of the statue as metonymical representations of the original, lost whole. This trope reminds readers that no one can escape mortality or forgetting: even the mighty fall!

And he is so lonely now. How isolating is such ambition ? 

His first circles of hell?

Marooned in a shifting desert that is slowly burying his vanity forever, an unnamed traveller returns to testify to Ozymandias’ fate. How ironic too that such a traveller is unnmaed and probably without fame or fortune yet returns to civilisation like a missiionary with news. And then we do not know if the narrator of the poem is Shelley the poet or another figure trapped within the narrative. Stories captured within stories so truth and myth slip and slide bewteen each other and all that we remember of the once powerful Ozymandias are his trunkless stone legs.

A poem without shelter or  solicitude?