- "Ozymandias" is a 14-line sonnet written by Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1817 about a traveler's encounter with the ruined statue of the once-mighty Egyptian pharaoh Rameses II. - The traveler tells the speaker of coming upon two vast stone legs without a body and a crumbling stone head half buried in the desert sand, which were all that remained of a statue with an inscription claiming "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings." - Around the decaying remains, nothing else survives except the "lone and level sands" stretching as far as the eye can see, vividly portraying how the vanity and

1. - P.B.SHELLEY
“Ozymandias” is a sonnet, a fourteen-line poem metered in
iambic pentameter. Shelley completed the poem in 1817 and published
it in England's The Examiner in 1818. Some of his other remarkable
works are “The Ode to the Westwind”, “Ode to A Skylark”, “The
Cloud”, and “Adonais”, an elegy on the death of John Keats. The poem
"Ozymandias" is one of the best sonnets of Percy Bysshe Shelley. In this
poem he described a mighty king who was striving in his whole life for
his possessions and got involved in worldly assignments so much that he
forgot his ultimate destiny. Beside this, Shelley reminds the readers of
their mortality through the realization that our earthly

2. accomplishments will one day be finished. By drawing these vivid and
ironic pictures in readers minds, with different symbols, Shelley tries to
illustrate that no one lives forever in the world, not even their assets or
belongings. The person referred to here is Rameses II of Egypt.
The speaker recalls having met a traveler “from an antique land,”
who told him a story about the ruins of a statue in the desert of his
native country. Two vast legs of stone stand without a body, and near
them a massive, crumbling stone head lies “half sunk” in the sand. The
traveler told the speaker that the frown and “sneer of cold command”
on the statue’s face indicate that the sculptor understood well the
emotions or "passions" of the statue’s subject. The memory of those
emotions survives "stamped" on the lifeless statue, even though both the
sculptor and his subject are both now dead. On the pedestal of the
statue appear the words,
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
But around the decaying ruin of the statue, nothing remains, only the
“lone and level sands,” which stretch out around it.
“Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
of that colossal wreck,boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away”
Thus, Shelly vividly portrays the impermanence of human vanity, pride
and authority through the mighty king Ozymandias. Howmuchever one

3. establishes on this material earth viz., name, fame wealth, reputation
would be washed away in due course of time with no
impression.