The poem “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley is one that often comes to mind when someone asks me what my favorite poem is. There are a number of things that I find fascinating about it and after reading it for the first time in one of my high school English classes, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
The first thing that strikes me about this poem is that it is a frame narrative. In the first line the narrator meets a traveler. After that, until the last three lines, the poem is the traveller telling a story to the narrator. This is a super interesting structure and leads me to wonder why it is set up like this. If I had to guess, the impetus of this poem plays a role in the structure of it. It is said that Shelley came up with this poem when he visited the British Museum and saw a display of the bust of King Ramses II. Maybe there was someone else with Shelley that told him some history about King Ramses, or maybe it just seemed right to approach this poem from a more removed perspective. Whatever drove Shelley to structure the poem like this I don’t know for sure but it is always interesting to contemplate what someone was thinking more than two-hundred years ago.
It’s important, too, to consider what it means that this poem is a sonnet as well. Sonnets are often equated with love so what purpose is it serving for Shelley here? I think he’s sort of subverting the sonnet form because there are some things that are not right with it. The rhymes are a little off and the syllable count isn’t right so the sonnet is imperfect. I think this feeds into the fact that Shelley wants us to see that Ozymandias was foolish to think he was all that. Shelley’s sonnet is just like how Ozymandias was as a ruler—looks good on the surface but when you dig a bit deeper you see the imperfections. I like this reading of the poem because it shows how structure can be used to compound meaning within a piece of writing.
Aside from the structure, I think what I find most powerful about this poem is its message on hubris. Time waits for no one and Shelley brings that to the forefront in his description of Ozymandias’ remains in the desert. What the great king once thought would last forever (his wealth, his buildings, his power) all crumble and go with time just as he does. There is nothing left except a worn bust and “level sands [that] stretch far and wide.”
Though this poem is not particularly complex, I find that it delivers a powerful message in a captivating way and it has stuck with me for many years now because of that.
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