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 sonnet around a story told secondhand—a traveller describing ruins in a far-off desert—which gives the whole poem a hushed, campfire quality, like news arriving from a great distance. The form is loosely sonnet-shaped, but the rhymes tangle and shift rather than settling into a tidy pattern, which suits a poem about things falling apart. The central image does all the work: a shattered stone face, still wearing its sneer of command, lying near a boastful inscription that nothing around it honors anymore. That gap between the king's words and the empty sand is the whole point. It still lands because the target isn't a specific tyrant but the very idea that power or fame might outlast time. Anyone who has watched an empire, a trend, or a certainty crumble feels the quiet irony of those lone and level sands stretching on, indifferent to what anyone once declared eternal.
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