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Reading room · Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1818)

Ozymandias

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Plain sans is the legibility stand-in until the Hyperlegible face ships.

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

Syllable counts are spelling estimates, usually right, sometimes one out.

What this poem says

Hard because: one long sentence told second-hand, with the point held back to the end.

A traveller tells the speaker about a ruined statue in the desert: just two legs, a broken face, and a big boast carved on the base — “Look on my works and despair.”

The joke of the poem is that there are no works left. The king, the sculptor, and the empire are all gone; only the empty desert is still there.

It says: power does not last, no matter how loudly it carves its name in stone.