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”.
If I had one piece of advice to English Literature students it would be this. BE CURIOUS!
For curiosity leads to questions and the students who ask questions reveal the underlining ‘character’ of any text. Look for the strange in a text; look for the moments where something makes you uneasy or even surprised !
Remember the quality of your curiosity is reflected in the quality of your questions and leads to lively insight.
I have written about this poem elsewhere on this site so do look there fora further, detailed analysis too.
Here we are faced with Shelley’s famous poem about power. It is a strange poem as we are gifted with the visual oddity of the broken fragments of some monumental structure stuck in the middle of a desert. Why should such an ambitious enterprise end so shabbily?
So my questions might be as follows:
1) Who is speaking in the poem and where are they speaking from?
The reader is listening to a framing narrator in Shelley’s Ozymandias. The narrator announces himself as a first person narrator ‘I’ and yet we find they seem incidental to the actual ‘event’ on which the story of the poem is based. For the ‘I’ ‘ is a shadowy witness, who in turn has encountered a ‘traveller’ whose observations form the basis of the poem and yet who also seems at a significant time distance from the ancient sculpture lying abandoned in some ‘antique land‘. This framing device gives the poem a casual aspect, suggesting that the encounter is only incidental to the lives of the narrators who bear second hand witness to Ozymandias’s yearnings. So it is a Russian Doll type of narrative model with the ‘original event’ kept at some signification distance from the interconnecting narrators who bear witness to the strange encounter .
2) Do we feel the narrators manage to communicate something of the long dead character of Ozymandias?
I can feel the intensity of Ozymandias’s ambition in the poem coupled with his dread of death and probable yearning for his monument to grant him eternal life. This is a deeply ironic poem as ambition and grandiosity lie ruined before us and before both narrators who reconstruct Ozymandias once again.
And yet ironically perhaps, despite the labyrinthine narrative device, we still feel the presence of Ozymandias’s futile yearning.
So we do feel the narrators manage to resurrect something of the character of Ozymandias and of his far away kingdom, so that the bathetic grandiosity of Ozymandias’s voice still resounds in our ears today:’ Look on my works, ye mighty and despair!’ How have the mighty fallen indeed!
The arrogance of the ruler’s attempt to transcend time, through his own image of himself is palpable. Indeed it is he who is left to ‘despair’. The ruins of his monument to his own power lie about the traveller, each testifying to the megalomania of the long dead ruler: ‘The hand that mock’d them..‘ Power has become fragmented and destroyed, cast aside by the inescapable march of time that has the power to obliterate(indifferently) the futile strivings of human beings no matter how much ‘status’ they may have once enjoyed.
3) Is Ozymandias’s vanity our own and if so does the poem deliver a very moral message to the reader?
The final three lines of the poem remain stark and haunting in the memory of the two narrators as they give presence to this image, as well as in the memory of the reader too.
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away”.For we recognize our own fears in the defiant arrogance of the dead King. We fear our own dusty decay, our return to nothingness, where our lives disappear and ore forgotten as if we had never been. Hence I feel the admiration and tragic pathos of the ‘colossal wreck‘. For if Ozymandias with all his power and wealth could not cheat time then neither can we who have far less economic and worldly power.
All we are left with is this final empty vista into timelessness and nothingness. The ‘sands‘ being synonymous with the relentless passage of time. We are haunted and awed at once, aware of the very bleak yet beautiful ‘gift’ the poem has brought us as we re-imagine the literal and metaphorical fall of Ozymandias, ‘king of kings’ now reduced to ‘two vast and trunkless legs of stone.‘ Ambition like life itself has become dismembered by the steady onslaught of time.
