poem

Ozymandias — Jun 19, 2026

Percy Bysshe Shelley

1 votes

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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 shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked 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.

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📖 About this poem

Shelley builds this poem like a set of nested frames: he hears about a traveller, who describes a statue, which itself carries an inscription boasting about its long-vanished empire. Each layer puts more distance between us and the king, and that distance is the joke. The sonnet's music turns unruly on purpose — the rhyme scheme twists and the sentences run past their line breaks, so the whole thing feels a little windblown, like the desert it describes.

The two images do all the work: a shattered stone face still wearing its old sneer, and that proud inscription — "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" — now surrounded by nothing but sand. The gap between the boast and the emptiness is where the poem lives.

It still lands because every age produces someone certain their power is permanent. The sand always answers back.