Ozymandias Ozymandias is a sonnet written by the English
romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley . First published in the 11 January 1818 issue of
The Examiner in London, it was included the following year in Shelley's collection Rosalind
and Helen, A Modern Eclogue; with Other Poems and after his death in a posthumous compilation
of his poems published in 1826.
Ozymandias is regarded as one of Shelley's most famous works and is frequently anthologised.
In antiquity, Ozymandias was an alternative name for the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II.
Shelley began writing his poem in 1817, soon after the announcement of the British Museum's
acquisition of a large fragment of a statue of Ramesses II from the thirteenth-century
BCE, and some scholars consider that Shelley was inspired by this.
The 7.25-ton fragment of the statue's head and torso had been recovered in 1816 from
the mortuary temple of Ramesses at Thebes by the Italian adventurer Giovanni Battista
Belzoni (1778–1823).
It was expected to arrive in London in 1818, but did not arrive until 1821.
Shelley wrote the poem in friendly competition with his friend and fellow poet Horace Smith
(1779–1849) who also wrote a sonnet on the topic.
Smith's poem would be first published in The Examiner a few weeks after Shelley's sonnet.
Both poems explore the fate of history and the ravages of time—that all prominent men
and the empires they build are impermanent and their legacies fated to decay and oblivion.
Shelley and Smith both contrast this fate to the lasting power of art.
Writing and publication history Publication history
The Banker and political writer Horace Smith spent the Christmas season of 1817-1818 with
Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley.
At this time members of Shelley's literary circle would sometimes challenge each other
to write competing sonnets on a common subject - Shelley, John Keats and Leigh Hunt wrote
competing sonnets on the Nile around the same time.
Shelley and Smith chose a passage from the Greek Historian Diodorus Siculus, which described
a massive Egyptian statue and quoted its inscription: “King of Kings Ozymandias am I.
If any want to know how great I am and where I lie, let him outdo me in my work.”
In the poem Diodorus becomes "a traveller from an antique land."
The two poems were later published in Leigh Hunt's The Examiner, published by Leigh's
brother John Hunt in London.
(Hunt was already planning to publish a long excerpt from Shelley's new epic The Revolt
of Islam later the same month.)
Shelley's was published on 11 January 1818 under the pen name Glirastes.
It appeared on page 24 in the yearly collection, under Original Poetry. Smith's was published,
along by a note signed with the initials H.S., on 1 February 1818.
Shelley's poem was later republished under the title "Sonnet.
Ozymandias" in his 1819 collection Rosalind and Helen, A Modern Eclogue; with Other Poems
by Charles and James Ollier and in the 1826 Miscellaneous and Posthumous Poems of Percy
Bysshe Shelley by William Benbow, both in London.
Smith's poem Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote this poem in competition
with his friend Horace Smith, who published his sonnet a month after Shelley's in the
same magazine.
It takes the same subject, tells the same story, and makes a similar moral point, but
one related more directly to modernity, ending by imagining a hunter of the future looking
in wonder on the ruins of an annihilated London.
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".
Comparison of the two poems Analysis and interpretation
Scansion "Ozymandias" is a sonnet, written in iambic
pentameter, but with an atypical rhyme scheme when compared to other English-language sonnets,
and without the characteristic octave-and-sestet structure.
Themes The central theme of "Ozymandias" is contrasting
the inevitable decline of all leaders and of the empires they build with their pretensions
to greatness.
"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 in his Bibliotheca historica, 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."
Shelley's poem may have been inspired by the arrival in London in 1821 of a colossal statue
of Ramesses II, acquired for the British Museum by the Italian adventurer Giovanni Belzoni
in 1816.
The poem was written and published before the statue arrived in Britain, but the reports
of the statue's imminent arrival may have inspired the poem.
The statue's repute in Western Europe preceded its actual arrival in Britain, and Napoleon
had previously made an unsuccessful attempt to acquire it for France.
The verb, "to mock," used in the poem to describe the actions of the sculptor, had two senses.
The older sense, "to fashion an imitation of reality" (as in "a mock-up"), existed for
several centuries before the poem was written.
By Shelley's day the second sense, "to ridicule" (especially by mimicking) had come to the
fore.
Cultural influence The poem has influenced the production of
numerous creative works across a range of artistic disciplines.
Crime novelist Robert B. Parker opens his 1981 Spenser novel "Early Autumn" with a full
quote of the poem.
The writer Alan Moore named a superhero Ozymandias, in his 1986-87 comic book miniseries Watchmen
and recited the poem in the course of the story.
The third-to-last episode of the American television series Breaking Bad, titled "Ozymandias",
was directly influenced by the poem's content, and draws on the poem's theme of greatness
and collapse.
The entire poem is also recited by lead actor Bryan Cranston in a trailer for the show's
final eight episodes.
In the fifth season episode of the TV series Mad Men entitled Dark Shadows, copywriter
Michael Ginsberg quotes the line "Look on my works ye mighty, and despair".
Woody Allen's films Stardust Memories (1980) and To Rome with Love (2012) use the term
"Ozymandias Melancholia", which Allen defines as "the realisation that your works of art
will not save you and will mean nothing down the line".
Musical works which reference the poem include a setting in Russian for baritone by the Ukrainian
composer Borys Lyatoshynsky.