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. . . .

The speaker of the poem begins by stating that he had met a traveller who came from an ancient country, here possibly, Egypt. The traveller told him about two large stone legs of a statue stand upright in the desert. The legs lack a torso or trunk to connect them.

                                             …..Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Near the legs, there is the broken face of the statue lying half buried in the sand. The statue's facial expression is a frown and a wrinkled lip, which form a commanding, haughty scorn on the broken face.

           Tell that its sculptor well those passions* read

Which yet survive, stamped* on these lifeless things,

The expression shows that the sculptor of the statue understood the passions, i.e., emotions of the person the statue is based on (Ozymandias’), and still those emotions survive, carved or imprinted forever on that inanimate stone.

*Passions (Line 6) - “Passions” refers to Ozymandias’s emotions, i.e., his arrogance, hatred, and sense of superiority. The sculptor originally read those “passions” on Ozymandias, and then carved them onto the stone, where from everyone could read those emotions.

*Stamped (Line 7) - Stamped means “carved or engraved.” However, “stamped” also calls to mind what Ozymandias wanted to do to his opposition: stamp them out. The use of "stamped" implies that Ozymandias’s tyranny is permanently branded into the statue along with his other features. 

The hand that mocked* them, and the heart that fed;

In making the face, the sculptor’s skilled hands mocked up a perfect recreation of those feelings and of the heart that fed those feelings. The hand is that of the sculptor and it is said to copy the image of Ozymandias vividly. The heart of the sculptor understood the emotions of Ozymandias and managed to show them effectively in the statue he made. Synecdoche has been used in the lines 'The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed'.

*Mocked (Line 8) - As he describes the artist who made the statue of Ozymandies, the traveller notes the features of the statues face as well as the “hand that mocked them.” Mock, in this context, has two meanings. First, it means both to make a copy or replica, as in the phrase "mock up." Second, it means to make fun of someone, as in "the bully mocked his victim's appearance. "By using the word "mock," the traveller suggests on the one hand that the sculptor made an excellent likeness of Ozymandias, but also that, by portraying Ozymandias's arrogant cruelty so vividly, the sculptor ridiculed, or at least implicitly critiqued him.

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

The words inscribed on the pedestal of the statue read: "My name is Ozymandias, the King who rules over other Kings. Behold what I have built, all you who think of yourselves as powerful, and despair at the greatness and superiority of my accomplishments."

Nothing beside remains*. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

There is nothing else in the area. Surrounding the remnants of the large statue is a never-ending and barren desert, with empty and flat sands stretching into the distance.

*Remains (Line 12) - “Remains” in this poem can have three different meanings. It can be the verb “to remain,” which means, “nothing else is left,” or it could be one of two nouns. 1. “Remains” can refer to a historical relic or object, so the sentence would mean that there is nothing left apart from the artifact of the statue. 2. "remains" could also mean a corpse, in which case the broken statue is being metaphorically portrayed as a dead human body: there was nothing besides these remains.