Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Ozymandias (Line 10) - Ozymandias is the ancient Greek name for the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II. He was a powerful king of ancient Egypt who ruled from (1301-1234 B. C.). This poem is about the ruins of his statue, said to have been found in the Sahara Desert. Shelley describes a crumbling statue of Ozymandias as a way to portray the transience of political power and to praise art’s power of preserving the past. Shelley had read the ancient Greek writer Diodorus Siculus’s transcription of the inscription on Ozymandias’s pedestal, and this poem emerged from a friendly poetry competition Shelley had with a friend, where the prompt was to compose a sonnet incorporating that transcription. Form: Ozymandias is a sonnet- a fourteen-line poem metered in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme is ABABACDCEDEFEF. It has no characteristic octave and sestet structure. Poem I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. .