Ozymandias
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.”
“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 “Ozymandias” refers to an alternate name of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II. In the poem, Shelley describes a crumbling statue of Ozymandias as a way to portray the transience of political power and to praise art’s ability to preserve 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 reflects Shelley’s interest in challenging conventions, both political and poetic.
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 which 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.
Themes
The Transience of Power
One of Shelley’s most famous works, “Ozymandias” describes the ruins of an ancient king’s statue in a foreign desert. All that remains of the statue are two “vast” stone legs standing upright and a head half-buried in sand, along with a boastful inscription describing the ruler as the “king of kings” whose mighty achievements invoke awe and despair in all who behold them. The inscription stands in ironic contrast to the decrepit reality of the statue, however, underscoring the ultimate transience of political power. The poem implicitly critiques such power through its suggestion that both great rulers and their kingdoms will fall to the sands of time.
In the poem, the speaker relates a story a traveler told him about the ruins of a “colossal wreck” of a sculpture whose decaying physical state mirrors the dissolution of its subject’s—Ozymandias’s—power. Only two upright legs, a face, and a pedestal remain of Ozymandias’s original statue, and even these individual parts of the statue are not in great shape: the face, for instance, is “shattered." Clearly, time hasn’t been kind to this statue, whose pitiful state undercuts the bold assertion of its inscription. The fact that even this “king of kings” lies decaying in a distant desert suggests that no amount of power can withstand the merciless and unceasing passage of time.
The speaker goes on to explain that time not only destroyed this statue, it also essentially erased the entire kingdom the statue was built to overlook. The speaker immediately follows the king’s declaration found on the pedestal of the statue—“Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”—with the line “Nothing beside remains.” Such a savage contradiction makes the king’s prideful dare almost comically naïve.
Ozymandias had believed that while he himself would die, he would leave a lasting and intimidating legacy through everything he built. Yet his words are ultimately empty, as everything he built has crumbled. The people and places he ruled over are gone, leaving only an abandoned desert whose “lone and level sands” imply that there's not even a trace of the kingdom’s former glory to be found. The pedestal’s claim that onlookers should despair at Ozymandias’s works thus takes on a new and ironic meaning: one despairs not at Ozymandias’s power, but at how powerless time and decay make everyone.
The speaker also uses the specific example of Ozymandias to make a broader pronouncement about the ephemeral nature of power and, in turn, to implicitly critique tyranny. The speaker evokes the image of a cruel leader; Ozymandias wears a “frown” along with the “sneer of cold command." That such “passions” are now recorded only on “lifeless things” (i.e., the statue) is a clear rebuke of such a ruler, and suggests that the speaker believes such tyranny now only exists on the face of a dead and crumbling piece of stone.
The poem's depiction of the destruction of Ozymandias and his tyranny isn’t entirely fictional: Ozymandias is the Greek name for the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II, who dramatically expanded Egypt’s empire and who had several statues of himself built throughout Egypt. In fact, the Ancient Greek writer Diodorus Siculus reported the following inscription on the base of one of Ozymandias’s statues: "King of Kings am I, Ozymandias. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works." By alluding to an actual ancient empire, and an actual king, the poem reminds readers that history is full of the rises and falls of empires. No power is permanent, regardless of how omnipotent a ruler believes himself to be. Even the “king of kings” may one day be a forgotten relic of an “antique land.”
The Power of Art
“Ozymandias” famously describes a ruined statue of an ancient king in an empty desert. Although the king’s statue boastfully commands onlookers to “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair,” there are no works left to examine: the king’s cities, empire, and power have all disappeared over time. Yet even as the poem insists that “nothing beside” the shattered statue and its pedestal remains, there is one thing that actually has withstood the centuries: art. The skillful rendering of the statue itself and the words carved alongside it have survived long after Ozymandias and his kingdom turned to dust, and through this Shelley’s poem positions art as perhaps the most enduring tool in preserving humanity’s legacy.
Although the statue is a “wreck” in a state of “decay,” its individual pieces show the skill of the sculptor and preserve the story of Ozymandias. The face is “shattered,” leaving only a mouth and nose above the desert sand, but the “frown,” “wrinkled lip,” and “sneer” clearly show Ozymandias’s “passions” (that is, his pride, tyranny, and disdain for others). The fragments interpret and preserve the king’s personality and show onlookers throughout history what sort of a man and leader Ozymandias truly was.
These fragments, then, are examples of art’s unique ability to capture and relate an individual’s character even after their death. In fact, the poem explicitly emphasizes art’s ability to bring personalities to life: the speaker explains that Ozymandias’s “passions” “yet survive” on the broken statue despite being carved on “lifeless” stone. Ozymandias may be dead, yet, thanks to the sculptor who “read” those “passions” and “mocked,” or made an artistic reproduction of them, his personality and emotions live.
In addition to highlighting the sculptor’s artistic skill, Shelley’s poem also elevates the act of writing through its focus on the inscription of the statue’s pedestal. The pedestal preserves Ozymandias’ identity even more explicitly than the statue itself. The inscription reveals his name, his status as royalty (“King of Kings”), and his command for “Mighty” onlookers to “despair” at his superiority and strength. His words are thus a lasting testament to his hubris, yet it is notably only the words themselves—rather than the threat behind them—that survive. Without this inscription, none would know Ozymandias’s name nor the irony of his final proclamation.
In other words, his legacy and its failure only exist because a work of art—specifically, a written work—preserved them. The poem therefore presents art as a means to immortality; while everything else disappears, art, even when broken and half-buried in sand, can carry humanity’s legacy.
This power of art is reflected by the composition of the poem itself. Shelley was aware that the ancient Greek writer Diodorus Siculus had described a statue of the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II and had transcribed the inscription on its pedestal as "King of Kings am I, Ozymandias. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works." Shelley’s poem exists solely because of Siculus’s description: Shelley and his friend and fellow writer Horace Smith had challenged each other to a friendly competition over who could write the best poem inspired by Siculus's description. This poem was Shelley’s entry, and it became by far the more famous of the two. Like Siculus’ description of the statue, this poem keeps Ozymandias’s story and words alive for subsequent generations.
The very composition of this poem, then, dramatizes the power of art: art can preserve people, objects, cities, and empires, giving them a sort of immortality, and letting future generations “look on [past] works” not with despair, but with wonder.
Man Versus Nature
As a Romantic poet, Shelley was deeply respectful of nature and skeptical of humanity’s attempts to dominate it. Fittingly, his “Ozymandias” is not simply a warning about the transience of political power, but also an assertion of humanity’s impotence compared to the natural world. The statue the poem describes has very likely become a “colossal Wreck” precisely because of the relentless forces of sand and wind erosion in the desert. This combined with the fact that “lone and level sands” have taken over everything that once surrounded the statue suggests nature as an unstoppable force to which human beings are ultimately subservient.
Shelley’s imagery suggests a natural world whose might is far greater than that of humankind. The statue is notably found in a desert, a landscape hostile towards life. That the statue is “trunkless” suggests sandstorms eroded the torso or buried it entirely, while the face being “shattered” implies humanity’s relative weakness: even the destruction of a hulking piece of stone is nothing for nature.
The fact that the remains of the statute are “half sunk” under the sand, meanwhile, evokes a kind of burial. In fact, the statement “nothing beside remains” can be read as casting the fragments of the statue as the “remains” of a corpse. The encroaching sand described in the poem suggests that nature has steadily overtaken a once great civilization and buried it, just as nature will one day reclaim everything humanity has built, and every individual human as well.
The desert, not Ozymandias, is thus the most powerful tyrant in Shelley’s poem. It is “boundless” and “stretch[es] far away” as though it has conquered everything the eye can see, just as it has conquered Ozymandias’s statue. Ozymandias may be the king of kings, but even kings can be toppled by mere grains of sand.
오지만디아스
나는 고대 나라에서 온 한 여행자를 만났는데
그는 말했다. "몸뚱이 없는 커다란 돌로 된 다리들이
사막에 서있다. 그 근방에는 모래 속에
반쯤 묻혀 있는 파괴된 얼굴이 있다. 그 찡그린 얼굴과
굳게 다문 입술과 싸늘한 명령의 냉소는
그 조각가가 왕의 정열을 이해하고 있음을 말해준다.
그 모든 정열은 그것을 묘사해 낸 손보다도
그것을 키워 준 심장보다도 오래 오래 생명 없는
물체에 새겨져 남아 있다.
그 대좌에는 다음과 같은 말이 새겨져 있다.
'내 이름은 오지맨디어스, 왕 중의 왕이로다.
너희 힘을 자랑하는 자여, 나의 위업에 절망하라!'
아무것도 그 옆엔 남아있는 것이 없다. 그 거대한
파괴된 잔해의 폐허 주위에는 끝없이
황량하고 쓸쓸한 사막만 아득하게 뻗쳐져 있다."
퍼시 비시 셸리(Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792-1822)는 영국 낭만주의 시인이다. 29세 젊은 나이로 이탈리아에서 보트 사고로 죽었다.
그의 둘째 부인은 메리 셸리(Mary Shelley)로 소설 프랑켄슈타인(Frankenstein; or, the modern Prometheus)으로 유명하다.
1818년 발표된 이 시는 셸리가 그의 친구 스미스(Horace Smith)와 같은 주제로 시 쓰기 경쟁을 하면서 썼다. 셸리를 대표하는 작품이 되었고 영미 시 선집에 거의 필수적으로 들어가는 명시가 되었다.
스미스의 시도 같은 제목 오지만디아스로 출간되었으나, 후에 제목을 바꾸었다.
오지만디아스는 이집트 람세스 2세(Ramesses II) 대왕을 그리스어로 부르는 이름이다. 당시 영국 박물관(The British Museum)이 람세스 2세의 석상 구입을 발표한 것이 시를 쓰게 된 계기가 되었다.
이 시에서 시인은 여행객을 만나 들은 이야기를 전하고 있다. 서두 도입 이후에는 여행자가 보고 느끼고 말한 형식이 된다.
시의 주제는 제왕, 권력자, 통치 체제 그 어느 것도 영원할 수 없으며, 오랜 시간이 지나면 영락하게 된다는 것이다.
오지만디아스가 다른 권력자에게 자기의 위업을 보고 절망하라고 외쳤지만, 지금 사막 한복판에 잔해가 되어 부서진 석상 머리를 보면 자신이 절망해야 하는 상황이다.
살아남은 것은 제왕의 찌푸리고 오만한 표정을 담아낸 조각가의 예술적 재능일 뿐이다. 인생은 부질없고 예술은 긴 셈이다.
인간의 오만을 경계하는 그리스 말이 있다. 휴브리스(hubris)이다. 그리스 극에서 주인공이 자신의 능력이나 행운을 과신하여, 종국에는 신의 분노를 불러일으켜 몰락하는 것을 말한다.
휴브리스는 지나친 자만심으로 나중에 후회하게 되는 인간의 오만을 말한다.
셸리가 이 시를 발표한 시점은 나폴레옹(Napoléon Bonaparte, 1769-1821)이 유럽을 휩쓸다 엘바 섬에 유배되어 이미 영락한 상황이다.