poem

Ozymandias — Aug 8, 2026

Percy Bysshe Shelley

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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

This is a poem about the shelf life of power. A traveler describes stumbling on the ruins of a massive statue in the desert — a shattered face, two stone legs standing with nothing to hold up — and the boastful inscription still carved into the pedestal, promising that lesser rulers should despair before this king's greatness. The joke, of course, is that nothing is left to despair over except sand.

Shelley builds the poem as a sonnet, but he loosens its rhymes so the structure feels a little worn down too, like the statue itself. The strongest image is that lone, sneering face half-buried in an empty landscape, boasting to no one.

It still lands because every era produces someone certain their name will outlast time, and the desert always disagrees.