Poetry’s Tightest Ball of Irony

Photo by Barry Bibbs on Unsplash

Here is an entire short poem by English Romantic Poet Percy Bysshe Shelley:

Ozymandias
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.”

The poem consists of only three sentences, but the first sentence contains numerous clauses. I wish to expatiate on this independent clause near the end of the poem titled “Ozymandias”: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;/ Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

This very short poem is actually a frame story in which the first-person narrator quotes a traveler he has met. The quotation limns a desert in an “antique land” where the ruinous remains of a once-mighty statue lie scattered.

The traveler creates yet a further frame (and a further irony) by informing the narrator that the sculptor of that statue read well the emotions powering the frown on the statue’s face. That frown has two meanings as does the inscription on the base of the statue.

The sculptor informs us, via the inscription, that Ozymandias is warning those who think themselves mighty that they can never hope to achieve his grandeur displayed before them. But the traveler seems to caution that time has turned Ozymandias’ preening admonition into a disheartening caveat that there is no one so mighty that time will not bring them to ruin.

Whether or not Ozymandias understood the second meaning of the inscripted command is for the reader to guess, but there is a definite hint by the narrator that the statue’s maker understood it well.