"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 removed in 1816 from the mortuary temple of Ramesses
at Thebes by the Italian adventurer Giovanni Battista Belzoni. 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 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. 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
Shelley wrote the 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", existed for several centuries before the poem was written. By Shelley's
day the second sense, "to ridicule" 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; in a teaser trailer for the
show's final eight episodes, the entire poem is recited by lead actor Bryan Cranston. 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 and To Rome with Love 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., and the song Ozymandias from
Glass Hammer's 2014 album Ode to Echo. A heavily modified version of Shelley's poem is recited
by the character Handsome Jack in a trailer for the video game Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!,
who loses his corporate empire and life at the end of Borderlands 2.
References
Further reading Rodenbeck, John. “Travelers from an Antique
Land: Shelley's Inspiration for ‘Ozymandias,’” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, no.
24, 2004, pp. 121–148. Johnstone Parr. "Shelley's 'Ozymandias,'"
Keats-Shelley Journal, Vol. VI. Waith, Eugene M. "Ozymandias: Shelley, Horace
Smith, and Denon." Keats-Shelley Journal, Vol. 44,, pp. 22–28.
Richmond, H. M. "Ozymandias and the Travelers." Keats-Shelley Journal, Vol. 11,, pp. 65–71.
Bequette, M. K. "Shelley and Smith: Two Sonnets on Ozymandias." Keats-Shelley Journal, Vol.
26,, pp. 29–31. Freedman, William. "Postponement and Perspectives
in Shelley's 'Ozymandias'." Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 63–73.
Edgecombe, R. S. "Displaced Christian Images in Shelley's 'Ozymandias'." Keats Shelley
Review, 14, 95–99. Sng, Zachary. "The Construction of Lyric Subjectivity
in Shelley's 'Ozymandias'." Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 37, No. 2, pp. 217–233.
External links Audiorecording of "Ozymandias" by the BBC.
LibriVox recording of "Ozymandias", selection 22, read by Leonard Wilson.
Representative Poetry Online: Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ozymandias"