ozymandias by percy bysshe shelley meaning

Not that art is totally pure for Shelley. Shelley thought poets were ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’ and there’s a hint of him crowing that it’s the arts that remain when all else is a distant memory. What has survived antiquity is not the king’s empire but a statue memorialised in another artwork: Shelley’s sonnet. Yet the sands around it are ‘boundless and bare’: none of Ozymandias’s works remain, only that of the sculptor who captured the king’s ‘sneer’. In this poem Shelley describes the remnants of a massive statue of a ‘king of kings’ (no false modesty here!) whose heart ‘fed’ on the very fact that he had the power to command such ‘vast’, ‘mighty’ things to be created. The lone and level sands stretch far away. Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed: Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,Īnd wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Play in your default media player Transcript

Ozymandias by percy bysshe shelley meaning