Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelley: a close look at the poem

A well-known sonnet about a famous Pharaoh

Ozymandias is one of the best-known works by the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822). It was written in 1817 at a time when Percy and Mary Shelley were living in England, before moving permanently to Italy the following year.

England during this period was experiencing unrest caused in part by bad harvests and the consequences of rapid industrialization. The wars against Napoleonic France had ended in 1815, and the country was recovering only slowly from the economic deprivations that had been caused by them.

This was therefore an age of growing political radicalism which was met by stern reactionary Toryism under Prime Minister Lord Liverpool. Shelley was one of the radicals, who would later write savage political satires such as “The Mask of Anarchy”. “Ozymandias” should be read in that context.

The poem

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…