"Ozymandias"

This article is about Shelley's poem. For other uses, see Ozymandias (disambiguation).

"Ozymandias" (IPA: /ɑziːˈmɑndiːɑs/ or /ɒziːˈmændiːəs/^{[citation needed]}) is a famous sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley, published in 1818. It is frequently anthologised and is probably Shelley's most famous short poem.

In addition to the power of its themes and imagery, the poem is notable for its virtuoso diction. The rhyme scheme of the sonnet is unusual^{[citation needed]} and creates a sinuous and interwoven effect (ABABACDCEDEFEF).

Analysis

"Ozymandias" was written in December 1817 during a writing contest, and first published in Leigh Hunt's Examiner of January 11, 1818. Shelley points out that the poem was selected for the book by his "bookseller" (publisher) and not by himself.

Despite its enduring popularity, some Shelley scholars have treated "Ozymandias" as one of the poet's lesser works. One major study, Harold Bloom's Shelley's Mythmaking (1959), doesn't mention it at all; but Bloom only intended to write about Shelley's longer poems and did not address many of his shorter works. Others (e.g. Ana-Maria Tupan, see ref.) treat it as marking a Late Romantic concern with the relationships between life, history, and art that is common to Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats, and Byron.

The 'Younger Memnon' statue of Ramesses II in the British Museum that inspired the poem

Ozymandias was another name of Ramesses the Great, Pharaoh of the nineteenth dynasty of ancient Egypt. [2] Ozymandias represents a transliteration into Greek of a part of Ramesses' throne name, User-maat-re Setep-en-re. The sonnet paraphrases the inscription on the base of the statue, given by Diodorus Siculus as "King of Kings am I, Osymandias. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works."^[1] Shelley's poem is often said to have been inspired by the arrival in London of a colossal statue of Ramesses II, acquired for the British Museum by the Italian adventurer Giovanni Belzoni in 1816.^[2]. However, Rodenbeck ^[3] points out that the poem was written and published before the statue arrived in Britain, and thus that Shelley could not have seen it.

In line 7, the word "survive" is a transitive verb, with "hand" and "heart" as its direct objects. These lines therefore mean that the passions evident in the arrogant and sneering "shatter'd visage" have survived (outlived) both the sculptor (whose hand mocked those passions by stamping them so well on the statue) and the pharaoh (whose heart fed those passions in the first place). The alternative reading makes "fed" intransitive, the sense then being "the heart that consumed" rather than "the heart that gave nourishment." Thus the pharaoh's insatiable heart "fed on" (was fed by) his passions, a common trope of the Petrarchan sonnet and its progeny.

Among the earlier senses of the verb "to mock" is "to fashion an imitation of reality" (as in "a mock-up");^[4] but by Shelley's day the current sense "to ridicule" (especially by mimicking) had come to the fore. It was already predominant even in the works of William Shakespeare and the King James Version of the Bible; but in the specific context of "the hand that mock'd them", we can read both "the hand that crafted them" and "the hand that ridiculed them".

In this sonnet Shelley celebrates the anonymous artist and his achievement, and our poet himself survives the ruins of the oppressor by making a tight, compact sonnet out of a second-hand story about ruins in a desert. The lone and level sands stretching far away suggest the desolation that results from the impulse to impose oneself on the landscape. When Shelley says "nothing beside remains," he suggests the nothingness of space around the ruins and of the ruins themselves, and he puns on the ruins as "remains." That there is nothing beside the ruins emphasises their loneliness and desolation, disconnected not only in space – from other physical things, but also in time – from the busy and important context in which they must have once existed, as an interconnected part of an ancient city.

This sonnet is often incorrectly quoted or reproduced. The most common misquotation – "Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!" – replaces the correct "on" with "upon", thus turning the regular decasyllabic (iambic pentameter) verse into an 11-syllable verse, which a licence that is generally avoided unless there is good reason to indulge in it.

Smith's poem

Percy Shelley apparently wrote this sonnet in competition with his friend Horace Smith, as Smith published a sonnet a month after Shelley's in the same magazine. It takes the same subject, tells the same story, and makes the same moral point. It was originally published under the same title as Shelley's verse; but in later collections Smith retitled it "On A Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below".^[5]

Smith's verse lacks the enduring appeal of Shelley's, and is not nearly so fondly remembered or so often quoted. Shelley's Ozymandias contains an accessible mystery, and a "moral" that can be pleasantly analysed in a school-room. It is a fairly archetypal example of what constitutes a classic poem in terms of the modern English literature syllabus. On the other hand, Smith's verse may appear excessively didactic or even heavy-handed, to some readers.

See also

• Egypt in the European imagination
• Sonnet
• Ozymandias (comics)

Further reading

• Reiman, Donald H. and Sharon B. Powers. Shelley's Poetry and Prose. Norton, 1977. ISBN 0-393-09164-3.
• Shelley, Percy Bysshe and Theo Gayer-Anderson (illust.) Ozymandias. Hoopoe Books, 1999. ISBN 977-5325-82-X
• Rodenbeck, John. “Travelers from an Antique Land: Shelley's Inspiration for ‘Ozymandias,’” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, no. 24 (“Archeology of Literature: Tracing the Old in the New”), 2004, pp. 121-148.

Notes

External links

• Representative Poetry Online: Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), "Ozymandias" (text of poem with notes)
• World Treasures (National Library of Australia) (autograph fair copy of the text from one of Shelley's notebooks; shows slight variants against modern editions)
• Horace Smith's poem of the same name, and of the same themes
• The later Romantics (survey by Ana-Maria Tupan, noting the ambiguity and irony suffusing "Ozymandias", and the way Shelley etc. distance themselves "from Blake's assault on Enlightenment ideology and poetics")
• "Ozymandias" and Stanley Marsh 3
• A popular Machinima adaption of the poem by Machinima pioneers Strange Company, praised as an adaptation by film critic Roger Ebert

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