The conventional interpretation of the poem is probably as well-known as the poem itself: Shelley criticizes authoritarian government despite all his grandiose claims, the tyrant Ozymandias, much like Napoleon, is gone and forgotten, his stone colossi smashed and abandoned in the lonely desert.
When Shelley wrote his poem, Ramesses II and his works were just being discovered as something more than the Ozymandias in the garbled account of Diodorus. Another scholar in Napoleon’s train, Jean-François Champollion, successfully deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs in 1815. From 1809 to 1818, they published the Description de l’Égypte, a twenty-three-volume catalogue of the land and its ancient ruins. His invasion of Egypt in 1798 brought a separate army of French scholars to study its antiquities. But Napoleon also raised Ancient Egypt to new prominence in the European imagination. Europe was still reeling from the twenty years of war he had inflicted on the continent and his single-handed reshaping of nations that had not changed since the Renaissance. Shelley published the poem in 1818-three years after the fall of Napoleon. The four colossi build into the Nubian cliffs at the temple of Abu Simbel are perhaps the most famous depictions of him-and they convey the grandiose scale of a monument such as Shelley describes in his poem. It is a Graecized corruption of the Egyptian Usermaatre-setepenre, the throne name of Ramesses II, who reigned as pharaoh for 67 years (1279-1213 BC), and was by far Ancient Egypt’s greatest builder of stone monuments. “Ozymandias” refers to an Egyptian king in the chronicles of the first-century B.C. The historical context behind the poem is indispensable for a proper analysis. The lone and level sands stretch far away. Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed. Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frownĪnd wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Who said:-Two vast and trunkless legs of stone The sonnet, like any other, should be read only in its entirety before analysis: And it is one of the few works, classical or modernist, that addresses a subject from that lodestone of the Western imagination, Ancient Egypt. Short, yet powerful and descriptive, it illustrates the sonnet at its best.
But it deserves every bit of the reputation it has gained. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” is one of his shortest works, but also one of his best known, anthologized to the point of ubiquity. It is about much more than the futility of tyranny: It is about the power of art. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” remains one of the best-crafted sonnets, as much for its vivid description as for the breadth and depth of its meaning.
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