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.
◆
Comments
Loading comments…
📖 About this poem
Shelley builds the poem as a story within a story — he meets a traveller, who describes a ruin, which carries its own inscription, so the boast at the center reaches us through three layers of distance before it even arrives. That structure is the joke and the point: the king demanded permanence, and all he got was secondhand gossip passed along by a stranger. The sonnet's music is deliberately broken too, with an irregular rhyme scheme that keeps slipping, mirroring the crumbling statue it describes. The central image does the real work: a shattered stone face still sneering with "cold command" even as its body lies scattered in empty sand, the proud inscription standing beside nothing at all. It lands today because every age produces its own Ozymandias, certain their towers and names will outlast time, and the desert's patient indifference is still the only thing that always wins.
Comments