summary of the poem Ozymandias
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Answer:
The poet met a traveler who came from a remote land. He told the poet that he saw the remains of a statue in the desert. Two huge legs made of stone stood and the remaining part of the statue – the upper body was missing. Another part of the statue, the face lay on the sand nearby. It was damaged and broken into pieces. The face of the statue had expressions of displeasure and a taunting smile. The wrinkles and lines of the face were also there. The poet says that the sculptor who had made the statue had read the expressions on the Egyptian king Ramesses’s face very well as he was able to copy them onto his statue so accurately. These expressions continued to exist even after the king’s death through this lifeless statue. The sculptor’s hands copied the king’s ruthless expressions and mocked at them while the king’s stone heart brought out these expressions on his face.
Explanation:
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“Ozymandias” is a sonnet written by the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley wrote “Ozymandias” in 1817 as part of a poetry contest with a friend, and had it published in The Examiner in 1818 under the pen name Glirastes. The title of “Ozymandias” refers to an alternate name of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II. In “Ozymandias,” Shelley describes a crumbling statue of Ozymandias as a way to portray the transience of political power and to praise art’s power of preserving the past. Although the poem is a 14-line sonnet, it breaks from the typical sonnet tradition in both its form and rhyme scheme, a tactic that reveals Shelley’s interest in challenging conventions, both political and poetic.
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“Ozymandias” Summary
The speaker of the poem meets a traveller who came from an ancient land. The traveller describes two large stone legs of a statue, which lack a torso to connect them, and stand upright in the desert. Near the legs, half buried in sand, is the broken face of the statue. The statue's facial expression—a frown and a wrinkled lip—form a commanding, haughty sneer. The expression shows that the sculptor understood the emotions of the person the statue is based on, and now those emotions live on, carved forever on inanimate stone. In making the face, the sculptor’s skilled hands mocked up a perfect recreation of those feelings and of the heart that fed those feelings (and, in the process, so perfectly conveyed the subject’s cruelty that the statue itself seems to be mocking its subject).
The traveller next describes the words inscribed on the pedestal of the statue, which say: "My name is Ozymandias, the King who rules over even other Kings. Behold what I have built, all you who think of yourselves as powerful, and despair at the magnificence and superiority of my accomplishments." There is nothing else in the area. Surrounding the remnants of the large statue is a never-ending and barren desert, with empty and flat sands stretching into the distance.