Ozymandias

This article is about Shelley's poem. For other uses, see Ozymandias (disambiguation).

OZYMANDIAS of EGYPT

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

"Ozymandias" (IPA: [ɑ.ziːˈmɑn.diːˌɑs] or [ɒ.ziːˈmæn.diːˌəs]) is a famous sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley, published in 1818. It is frequently anthologised and is probably Shelley's most famous short poem.

It deals with a number of themes, such as the arrogance and transience of power, the permanence of real art and emotional truth, and the relationship between artist and subject. It explores these themes with striking imagery, using a setting—Egypt and the Sahara desert—that was exotic for European audiences in the early 19th century. The poem's sense of distance is further enhanced by its second-hand narration; the commentator is relating to us the words of an unnamed "traveller from an antique land". There is an echo of the classical "Viator!" motif here - many epitaphs in antiquity addressed a passing traveller.

In addition to the power of its themes and imagery, the poem is notable for its virtuoso diction.

Shelley's poem

"Ozymandias" was written in December 1817 during a writing contest, and first published in Leigh Hunt's Examiner of January 11, 1818. It was republished in Shelley's Rosalind and Helen volume of 1819, and in the "Advertisement" prefacing the volume, Shelley describes it as one of "a few scattered poems I left in England" which were used to pad out the book. Shelley also points out that the poem was selected for the book by his "bookseller" (publisher) and not by himself. Some consider these nonchalant statements as indicating that Shelley was not particularly proud of this piece. Others disagree, given the consistency of the poem's ideas with Shelley's hatred of tyranny, and the powerful impact of the poem.

Despite its enduring popularity, many Shelley scholars have seen it as a piece of trivia, and few studies of Shelley's career make much of it. Harold Bloom's Shelley's Mythmaking (1959), the major Shelley study of the 20th century and the book that restored the importance of Shelley's reputation, does not mention it at all. This, however, is hardly surprising given Bloom's reactionary, aestheticizing position on art and its human/social significance (see article by Henry Giroux).

Fallen colossus of Ramesses II, Ramesseum, Luxor

The name Ozymandias (or Osymandias) is generally believed to refer to Ramesses the Great (i.e., Ramesses II), Pharaoh of the Nineteenth dynasty of ancient Egypt. Ozymandias represents a transliteration into Greek of a part of Ramesses's throne name, User-maat-re Setep-en-re. The sonnet paraphrases the inscription on the base of the statue, given by Diodorus Siculus 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."

Contemporary British readers may have associated Egypt with a more contemporary idea of tyranny through Napoleon Bonaparte, who fought with England over Egypt in 1798-1799, and whose final defeat at Waterloo had occurred only three years before the poem was written.

In line 7, the word "survive" is a transitive verb, with "hand" and "heart" as its direct objects. Thus, the lines mean that those passions (arrogance and sneer) have survived (outlived) both the sculptor (whose hand mocked those passions by stamping them so well on the statue) and the pharaoh (whose heart fed those passions in the first place).

The verb "mock'd" originally meant "to create/fashion an imitation of reality" (as in "a mockup") before meaning "to ridicule" (especially by mimicking). In Shelley's day, the latter meaning was predominant (as seen in the works of William Shakespeare or the King James Version of the Bible), but in the specific context of "the hand that mock'd them", we can read both "the hand that crafted them" and "the hand that ridiculed them".

The impact of the sonnet's message comes from its double irony. The tyrant declares, "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" Yet nothing remains of Ozymandias' works but the shattered fragments of his statue. So "the mighty" should despair — not, as Ozymandias intended, because they can never hope to equal his achievements, but because they will share his fate of inevitable oblivion in the sands of time. A second irony lies in the "survival" of the tyrant's character in the fragments being due not to his own powers but to those of the artist.

This poem is often incorrectly quoted or reproduced. The most common misquote—"Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!"—replaces the correct "on" with "upon", thus turning the regular decasyllabic (iambic pentameter) verse into an 11-syllable verse.

Smith's poem

In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows: –
"I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,
"The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
"The wonders of my hand." – The City's gone, –
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.

We wonder, – and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.
--Horace Smith.
 

Shelley apparently wrote this sonnet in competition with his friend Horace Smith, as Smith published a sonnet a month after Shelley's, in the same magazine, which takes the same subject, tells the same story, and makes the same moral point. It was originally published under the same title as Shelley's verse; in later collections, however, Smith retitled it "On A Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below".

In contrast to Shelley's subtlety, Smith's poem sucks. Shelley's poem refrains from stating a specific moral as such, and instead presents a vivid tableau, leaving readers to draw their own conclusions and ponder upon the themes. The moral pathos against tyranny is so strong, however, that few readers are likely to conclude that poor Ozymandias got a raw deal from time and the elements. Nor does it address an audience of a specific time or place: until the English language falls into disuse or changes enough for the poems to be unintelligible, the audience is whoever is reading the poem and not just a Londoner. The image of a destroyed London will have no more or less effect on someone not from London than Ozymandias's statue. Also, by not wasting words on didactically pointing a "moral", as Smith does, Shelley is able to compress a comprehensive vision into a few lines, and encompass in his poem ideas entirely absent from Smith's poem.

In pop culture

Shelley's poem and the character of Ozymandias are frequently referenced in popular culture.

In Television and Film

The poem and author are depicted (however inaccurately) in episode 41 of Monty Python's Flying Circus, in the sketch titled "Ant Poetry Reading."

Literature

• The trilogy of novels The Tripods, and the TV series based upon them, features a Vagrant (a wandering lunatic whose mind was destroyed by attempted brainwashing) who claims his name is Ozymandias. In the first book, The White Mountains, the man (whose real name is never given) says, "I am the king of this land. My wife was the queen of a rainy country, but I left her weeping. My name is Ozymandias. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair." The protagonist, Will, remembers reading the name Ozymandias in a poem. The irony is that setting of The Tripods is a post-apocalyptic world where people live a 17th-century existence among the ruins of the 20th century.
• The poem was referenced and printed in full in the first book of the Children of the Lamp series.
• In the Deathstalker series, Owen Deathstalker has an AI named Ozymandias that turns on Owen but is "killed". He is resurrected several times throughout the series for different purposes.
• The sonnet is referenced in George R.R. Martin's early novel, "Fevre Dream".
• Robert Silverberg short story based on the class poem.
• Ozymandias appears in Piers Anthony's "Incarnations of Immortality" series. He plays a prominent role in the sixth book, For Love of Evil, helping the protagonist, Parry, ascend as Satan to the office of Evil. The famous couplet "My name is...and despair!" is quoted, and the end of the poem is paraphrased.
• "My name is...and despair!" is also quoted in The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham.
• Jasper Fforde's book The Eyre Affair features a character by the name of Detective Inspector Oswald Mandias, CID, a pompous Yorkshireman who is easily impressed by fellow members of the Most Worshipful Brotherhood of the Wombat.
• Ozymandias is quoted in the prologue of Jared M. Diamond's book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, which analyses the downfall of many of History's great civilizations.
• Ozymandias is the name of the circus elephant in G.P. Taylor's fantasy novel Tersias.
• In a New York Times op-ed column on August 15, 2006, Thomas Frank described two once-famous 19th Century Americans as being "as obscure as Ozymandias".
• Ozymandias is the name of one of the wonderful flying children in James Patterson's "When the Wind Blows".
• "My name is Ozymandias... despair" is quoted in the final pages of Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October.
• Ozymandias and references to the poem are made in the "Star Trek" based novel "Federation" by Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens.
• The character Finn in Angela Carter's 1967 novel The Magic Toyshop misquotes Ozymandias by proclaiming: "Look on my works, ye mighty, and beware".

Music

• Shelley's poem was referenced in the Sisters of Mercy song "Dominion/Mother Russia", on the album Floodland.
• Ozymandias is mentioned in The Stranglers' song "Ugly", from their 1977 album Rattus Norvegicus. Stranglers bassist Jean Jacques Burnel, who wrote the lyrics for "Ugly", later used the words of "Ozymandias" (without credit to Shelley) as the lyric to the B side of his 7" single "Freddie Laker (Concorde and Eurobus)".
• The fourth album of the German medieval techno group Qntal is titled Ozymandias, and the title track whispers the phrase "My name is Ozymandias" several times.
• "My Name Is Ozymandias" appears as a song title by Gatsbys American Dream on their 2006 self-titled, full-length album. "The White Mountains" and "Shadows of Colossus" are also titles to songs on the album. These also are references to Ozymandias and The Tripods book series.

Comics

• One of the primary characters Alan Moore's comic book limited series Watchmen is named Ozymandias as part of his fascination with Alexander the Great and Ramesses II. The poem also provided the source for the title of issue #11, "Look on My Works, Ye Mighty" and ends with a quote from the poem.
• In Marvel Comics, Ozymandias is a servant of the supervillain Apocalypse in the X-Men franchise. He first appeared in Uncanny X-Men #332.
• In the first strip of the webcomic Errant Story, the poem is quoted in full. Phrases from the poem are used as the titles of subsequent chapters.
• Cartoonist Dorothy Gambrell refers to Ozymandias in a strip entitled "Memory Lanes", part of her webcomic Cat and Girl. A trophy with part of the poem engraved on it was also made available through her site.
• Ozymandias is the name of one of the title characters in D.C. Simpson's Ozy and Millie. A lyric of the poem is referenced on March 7, 2001.
• In the Huntress back-up feature of Wonder Woman vol. I, no. 319, the solution to a statue forgery crime comes to Helena Wayne as she reads Shelley's Ozymandias in bed.
• In the online comic Funny Farm by Ryan Smith, Mileena mentioned growing up with a boy named Ozymandias during a flashback on October 4,2000.

Games

• An excerpt from the poem is included in the computer game Civilization IV.
• Ozymandias appears in an easter egg in Perfect Dark, a console game. Cassandra DeVries' necklace has the code "18M0ZYM8ND185". This, upon inspection, spells out "IAMOZYMANDIAS", and likely refers to DeVries' power complex.
• In the computer game Escape from Monkey Island, one of the villains proclaims: "I am Ozzie Mandrill, King of the Caribbean! Look on my works, ye mighty pirates, and despair!"
• The Machinima group Strange Company produced a version of the poem using Machinima technology in 1999, which was praised by film critic Roger Ebert.
• An excerpt from the poem was included in the Apple II computer game "Ultima II" in approximately 1980.
• In the last level of Jurassic Park: Trespasser, there is an easter egg where John Hammond (played by Richard Attenborough) quotes the entire poem in a voice-over.

The Poem and archaeology

The "wrinkled lip and sneer" are not actually found on any extant sculptures of Ramses II or any other Pharaoh. Pharaonic faces always have a Buddha-like serenity in Egyptian art.

See also

• Egypt in the European imagination
• Sonnet

Further reading

• Reiman, Donald H. and Sharon B. Powers. Shelley's Poetry and Prose. Norton, 1977. ISBN 0-393-09164-3.
• Shelley, Percy Bysshe and Theo Gayer-Anderson (illust.) Ozymandias. Hoopoe Books, 1999. ISBN 977-5325-82-X
• Rodenbeck, John. “Travelers from an Antique Land: Shelley's Inspiration for ‘Ozymandias,’” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, no. 24 (“Archeology of Literature: Tracing the Old in the New”), 2004, pp. 121-148.

Notes

• Rodenbeck, John (2004). "Travelers from an Antique Land: Shelley's Inspiration for 'Ozymandias". Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics. 24 (Archeology of Literature: Tracing the Old in the New): 121–148.

External links

• Representative Poetry Online: Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), Ozyman (text of poem with notes)
• World Treasures (National Library of Australia) (autograph fair copy of the text from one of Shelley's notebooks; shows slight variants against modern editions)
• Horace Smith's poem of the same name, and of the same themes
• Ramesses the Great (general information about Ramesses)
• Cultural Politics and the Crisis of the University (article by Henry Giroux on the ideological and literary position of Harold Bloom among others)