Ozymandias

Writing and publication

The banker and political writer Horace Smith spent the Christmas season of 1817–1818 with Percy and Mary Shelley. At this time, members of their literary circle would sometimes challenge each other to write competing sonnets on a common subject: Shelley, John Keats, and Leigh Hunt wrote competing sonnets about the Nile around the same time. Shelley and Smith both chose a passage from the writings of the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus in Bibliotheca historica, which described a massive Egyptian statue and quoted its inscription: "King of Kings Ozymandias am I. If any want to know how great I am and where I lie, let him outdo me in my work." In Shelley's poem, Diodorus has been replaced by "a traveller from an antique land" whom Shelley metaphorically "met".

Shelley wrote the poem around Christmas 1817—either in December that year or early January 1818. The poem was published on 11 January 1818 under the pen name "Glirastes" in The Examiner, a weekly paper published by Leigh's brother John Hunt in London. Hunt admired Shelley's poetry, and published many of his other works, such as The Revolt of Islam, in The Examiner. Shelley's pen name meant "lover of dormice", "Dormouse" being his pet name for his spouse, author Mary Shelley.

Smith's sonnet of the same name was published several weeks later. Shelley's poem also appeared on page 24 in the yearly collection, under Original Poetry. It appeared again in Shelley's 1819 collection Rosalind and Helen, A Modern Eclogue; with Other Poems, which was republished in 1876 under the title "Sonnet. Ozymandias" by Charles and James Ollier and in the 1826 Miscellaneous and Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley by William Benbow, both in London.

Text

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. 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.

— Percy Shelley, "Ozymandias", 1819 edition

Analysis

The prominent theme of the poem is the inevitable decline of rulers and their hubris. In the poem, despite Ozymandias' grandiose ambitions, the power turns out to be ephemeral.

Scholars such as professors Nora Crook and Newman White have viewed the work as critical of Shelley's contemporaries George IV, with the statue's legs a coded reference to the then Prince Regent's gout and possible sexually-transmitted diseases, and critical of Napoleon Bonaparte. That the poem is connected to Napoleon is indeed the 21st century accepted reading.

Byron scholar Peter Cochran asserted the poem to be "a lesson to tyrants", listing Napoleon, George IV, Metternich, Tsar Alexander I, Emperor Francis, and Castlereagh. Jalal Uddin Khan connects it, in addition, to the statement of Muammar Gaddafi that he was Africa's "king of kings". That it connects in people's minds to rulers who post-date Shelley is illustrated by incidents such as the one CNN journalist who reported the aerial bombing of Iraq in 1991 signing off the report with the final three lines of the poem.

Other real historic persons to have referred to themselves in such terms include Ashurbanipal who had "I am a hero; I am gigantic; I am colossal; I am magnificent." carved in stone, and Meñli I Giray, who styled himself "Sovereign of Two Continents and Khan of Khans of the Two Seas".

The tragic fall of powerful men is a theme common in literature, from Giovanni Boccaccio's De Casibus Virorum Illustrium through John Lydgate's The Fall of Princes to The Monk's Tale, by Geoffrey Chaucer. The consensus of modern scholarship is that Byron's Childe Harold Canto 3, which was about the fall of Napoleon and whose manuscript Shelley had transported to Byron's publisher John Murray, was also a prompt for the poem.

Like Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Kubla Khan and Shelley's own Alastor, the poem may be viewed in the context of a wave of Orientalism prevalent in Western Europe, helped along by such events as the invasion of Egypt in 1798 by Napoleon and the accompanying Description of Egypt. The imagery of the statue's harsh, but commanding, bearing is evocative of the Byronic hero, and professor Hadley J. Mozer has gone further in suggesting that Shelley was describing Byron's own 1814 portrait by George Henry Harlow.

Reception and impact

The poem has been cited as Shelley's best-known and is generally considered one of his best works, although it is sometimes considered uncharacteristic of his poetry. An article in Alif cited "Ozymandias" as "one of the greatest and most famous poems in the English language". Stephens considered that the Ozymandias Shelley created dramatically altered the opinion of Europeans on the king. It has been translated into Russian, as Shelley was an influential figure in Russia. The influence of the poem may be found in other works, including Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë.

"Ozymandias" has been included in many poetry anthologies, particularly school textbooks, such as the UK's AQA GCSE English Literature Power and Conflict Anthology, where it is often included because of its perceived simplicity and the relative ease with which it may be memorized. Several poets, including Richard Watson Gilder and John B. Rosenman, have written poems entitled "Ozymandias" in response to Shelley's work.

Ozymandias gilberti, a giant fossil fish from the Miocene of California that is known only from a few fragmentary remains, was named by David Starr Jordan as an allusion to the poem.

The fourteenth episode of the final season of Breaking Bad, covering the dramatic downfall of protagonist Walter White, was entitled "Ozymandias". A recitation of the poem by series lead Bryan Cranston was used in a trailer for the series.

The poem is quoted in the 2017 Ridley Scott science fiction film Alien: Covenant, part of the Alien franchise. The poem is also used in the plot to show David's fallibility as he attributes the poem not to Shelley, but to Lord Byron. Walter reacts: "When one note is off, it eventually destroys the whole symphony, David."

Ozymandias is used in a promotional short film for Bungie's 2026 title Marathon, read by Ben Starr as his in-game character Durandal.

The British stoner/doom metal band Green Lung have recorded a song called "Ozymandias", released on their fourth album "Necropolitan". The song is a loose lyrical adaptation of Shelley's sonnet.