'Ozymandias' and the Ruins of Power: Shelley's Vision of Empire

In this week’s episode of Beyond the Verse, the official podcast of PoemAnalysis.com and Poetry+, hosts Joe and Maiya delve into the world of Percy Bysshe Shelley with a close reading and analysis of his 1818 sonnet, 'Ozymandias.' They explore the poem’s profound reflections on power, legacy, and the inevitable passage of time as Shelley critiques the hubris of rulers who believe themselves immortal.

Maiya and Joe unpack Shelley’s layered portrayal of decay, the influence of Romantic ideals, and the broader implications of empire in a rapidly changing world. They reflect on Shelley’s unique position as a radical voice in the Romantic era, questioning the nature of power and the forces of art that survive long after empires crumble. In this journey, they discuss the deeper meanings of Shelley’s “colossal wreck” and how the poem resonates with contemporary reflections on history and art.

Poetry+ users can access exclusive PDFs of 'Ozymandias':

• ​Full PDF Guide​
• PDF Snapshot Guide​
• Printable Poem PDF​
  • with Rhyme Scheme​
  • with Meter Syllables​
  • with both Rhyme and Meter​

For more on Percy Bysshe Shelley's poetry, visit PoemAnalysis.com, where you can explore extensive resources in our PDF Learning Library, explore a wide range of analyzed poems, with thousands of PDFs, and much more - see our Percy Bysshe Shelley PDF Guide.

This episode underscores why 'Ozymandias' remains a staple in literary studies and its enduring relevance in understanding human ambition and mortality.

Tune in and discover:

• The timeless significance of Shelley’s depiction of Ozymandias
• Shelley’s critique of empire through irony and structure
• The influence of Shelley’s radical Romantic beliefs
• How Shelley’s themes continue to speak to us today

Transcript

'Ozymandias' and the Ruins of Power: Shelley's Vision of Empire (Transcript)
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[00:00:00] 

Joe: I met a traveler 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.

Maiya: Welcome to Beyond the Verse, a poetry [00:01:00] podcast brought to you by Poemanalysis.com in partnership with Poetry+. Now today we are talking about Ozymandias by Percy Shelley. Thank you so much for your reading at the start there, Joe. Now today we're going to be touching on the relationship between power and time and the importance of place and narrative voice. 

Joe: Well, many of our listeners will already be familiar with Percy Shelley as one of the most important Romantic Poets of his era alongside the likes of William Wordsworth, John Keats and Lord Byron.

He was born in 1792 and this poem was first published in the Examiner in 1818, just three years before the poet's death in a boating accident at the age of 29 in what is modern day Italy. So relatively late in his life, although of course the sudden unexpected nature of his death meant he could not have known that.

There was not a poem written with old age in sight and yet many of its themes relate to kind of the way in which things fall apart and decay. In fact we might talk about this later, the poem almost feels as though it might be written by a much older man who's a little bit more introspective. In terms of the sort of the broad facts [00:02:00] of his life that are relevant for today's episode, many of our listeners will be aware that Percy Shelley was married to Mary Shelley, née Godwin, who of course wrote the very, very famous Gothic novel, Frankenstein. 

They eloped together in 1814 and the poem itself was written in 1817 as a kind of competition with a fellow friend and poet, Horace Smith, who challenged Percy Shelley alongside himself to write a sonnet about Ramesses II, who was a pharaoh in ancient Egypt, and the title of this poem, Ozymandias, is the Greek name for Ramesses II.

So that's kind of a little bit about the poem itself, as a background, where it comes from, a little bit more about Shelley, but Maiya, in terms of the poem itself, there's so much to discuss here, but where would you like to begin? 

Maiya: I mean the first thing I think it's incredibly important to note here is that this poem is based on a real set of ruins that were discovered of Ramesses II. Now, at this point in time, the late 18th, early 19th century, there was a trend of what is now known as Egyptomania. There was a huge number of artifacts that were discovered during this time. So [00:03:00] Egypt was very much in the forefront of people's minds. Ramesses II was known as Ramesses the Great. Not only did he reign for 66 years between 1279 to 1213 BCE, but he was revered for social, military, diplomatic achievements. He was also an autocrat. He had absolute power. Now this is something the poem deals with very, very explicitly about pride and power and hubris. So, Jo, let's start with that first few lines. 

Joe: The first place to really focus our attention is on that opening line, I met a traveller from an antique land, because what that immediately establishes is a degree of distance between the poet and, of course, the reader, with this figure of Ramesses. And again, the title, which perhaps we'll touch upon later on when we actually get the voice of Ozymandias, is kind of deliberately, obfuscatory in a way. By using the Greek name for the Egyptian ruler, Percy Shelley is already kind of playing with layers of history. Because the [00:04:00] traveler in this poem is actually based upon a real life Greek historian, ancient Greek historian by the name of Diodorus Siculus Siculus was himself, to us, a very ancient source, but he was looking back at Ramesses II, who to him was also ancient. you really get a sense of the scale of history here, but I think the decision to frame Siculus as a contemporary of the poet, as somebody the poet could themselves have interacted with, is really fascinating.

The reason for that is simple because what it does is it forces us as the modern readers to look at history through a much more contracted lens. It almost distorts the sense of distance. And the reason for that is because Shelley is not just making a point about the collapse of one great ruler, he's thinking about the collapse of empire more broadly.

And we're going to talk about this at great length, but I love the way that opening line kind of wrong foots the reader somewhat and kind of challenges their expectation of what is contemporary in this poem and how close we can feel to the ancient world.

Maiya: Absolutely, and as the poem moves [00:05:00] on and you come to understand that actually the voice we're hearing in this poem is that of the traveller, it creates even more distance between the reader and the speaker of the poem. Now, because we begin with I met, you immediately assume that the rest of this poem is going to follow in the first person, it's going to be I met, I saw. Because it isn't, because you then take that secondary voice. It almost, for me, creates a sense of slight distrust. Whereas usually when you read any sort of first person narrative, you feel quite intimately involved with that speaker, and here you don't. It just adds and adds to that sense of distance and separation. 

Joe: I think it also really captures something about Shelley's own relationship to these artifacts that you mentioned. So it's likely that Shelley was inspired to write the poem once the British Museum in 1817 acquired a statue called the Younger Merman which is a statue of Ramesses II.

Now By the time it made it to London in 1821, Shelly was [00:06:00] not living in the UK. Shelly was in Italy where he died. So it's likely he never actually saw this statue. So again, that sense of distance, That sense that this statue is based on an account of an account is replicating what Shelly himself experienced with regard to his own relationship to these artefacts. He never saw these things in his own eyes. 

Maiya: I'd actually really like to look at this second line because I think it's another one that adds to that sense of scale. Too vast and trunkless legs of stone. Now aside from being an objectively brilliant descriptor, the choices that Shelley makes here. This poem seems to add to that sense of intrigue. Rather than, you know, in many instances, when you first meet someone when you look at a statue, you see its face. We understand that there is a face within this poem. However, you're introduced from the legs upwards. Now this creates a sense of anonymity, yes, but also a sense of real grand scale.

From the moment we are introduced, you recognize [00:07:00] it to be absolutely enormous. 

Joe: You imagine the speaker gradually kind of looking up this vast statue and there was a sudden sense of disconnect and the reason for that break in the line that disruptive use of caesura is because as the poem goes on to describe the upper body of this statue is nowhere to be seen.

It has collapsed, it has broken in half and It is sort of a few meters away on the sand and That immediately sets up what the poem is going to go on to explore which is about collapse and obviously the physical collapse of the statue is meant to represent and kind of embody the collapse of empire not only of Ramesses II and his own personal legacy but of the Egyptian empire more broadly and as we're going to discuss later on Shelley is actually looking to extrapolate learnings from this to apply to kind of empire more broadly no matter how grand this statue was and as Maiya says those lines emphasize a scale it too has collapsed it too has broken the poet's attention then shifts to look at the upper body of the statue, in particular paying attention to its face. And I just think it's really important for listeners and readers to have a [00:08:00] sense of scale here. Maiya mentioned the dates that Ramesses lived and ruled earlier on.

This is more than 3000 years for us in 2024. And even for Shelly, you're looking at more than two and a half thousand years old. And yet the description is so sharp, we're told that the statue has identifiable features. His frown and his wrinkled lip is sneer of cold command. And for me, this touches upon one of the really fascinating undercurrents of the poem because.

Yes, Shelley is talking about empire. Yes, he's talking about the lives of great men and yet Shelley is a poet, Shelley is an artist. Inevitably, Shelley cannot help but admire fellow artists and the attention poured into those facial expressions, for me, is Shelley doffing his cap, not to the king, not to the pharaoh, but to the sculptor, the unnamed artisan, who was able to create this image of a person with real personality.

And I guess the fact that you and I, Maiya, are sat here talking about this poem, not thousands of years, granted, but hundreds of years later, [00:09:00] is kind of testament to that very idea. 

Maiya: I couldn't agree more and, you know, let's not forget that encapsulating the idea of a whole movement of the romantics. Very much valued individualism over collective endeavour, and particularly looked at exploring the consequences of unbridled power. Now, as Joe says in this poem, he explicitly doffs his cap to the sculptor. It's sculptor well those passions read, which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things.

He is sat there and telling us that regardless of power and time, what stays is art. I think it's very telling that this poem, despite being done as a writing exercise, When you look at its content, I find it very hard to believe that Shelley wasn't actively aiming for this poem to be one that was read and re read and revised and revisited. This is a poem, ultimately, about what has power within the world, and it's one of those that I think proves time and time [00:10:00] again that it is art. Art lasts. It's retold. 

Joe: I mean, maybe we'll talk a little bit at the end of the podcast, as we often do, about kind of the afterlife of this poem, but The number of people that drew upon it for inspiration I mean we already talked in a previous episode on W. B. Yeats is the second coming is one of our best episodes about the way in which Yeats was, you know, I think very explicitly engaging with this poem because It's such a touchstone for artists who are looking to explore Kind of timeless themes around the collapse and rise of empire. I'd just like to touch upon something that we were looking at a moment ago which is those lines especially how the sculptor was able to stamp his vision on these lifeless things because the hyperbolic nature of that description imbues a sculptor with some kind of almost divine power.

That's a kind of god like description, that ability to create, that ability to meld the world in your own image. And I love the way that's juxtaposed against the figure of Ozymandias who professes himself to be a god like figure later on [00:11:00] when he uses the phrase king of kings, which obviously to modern readers is very very biblical.

Now of course, Rameses II lived in a pre biblical age, but there is no doubt that Shelley is aware of the fact that by using the phrase King of Kings, he is suggesting that Ozymandias viewed himself as a kind of Christ like figure, as somebody with divine power. The irony of the poem, therefore, is that Shelley decides to imbue that power, not in Ozymandias, but in the unnamed sculptor who is able to create the world in his own image.

Maiya: And one of the things I always think is very interesting about this poem in particular is that a lot of the time when you discuss history, it tends to at least aim for some sort of unbiased account. This is not one of those. Yes, it is a poem. Yes, it is partially, at least, influenced by some sort of fictional creative power, right? However, when you explore this poem, and you said it before, the wrinkled lip, the sneer of cold command, the frown, not only is Shelley [00:12:00] offering us a really, really critical descriptor of what, This statue looks like, but he is also imbuing that with the power to say, this is what the real life person was like.

He actually adds to all of those terrible things that may have been assumptions. And instead of focusing on the achievements of Ozymandias, he focuses on the effect that he had on people. The sculptor in fact created that look because it was one that they had seen so many times. Now you have a real sense of fear that's created here. Even 3, 000, 2, 500 years down the line. And I think it's fascinating to see, even now, That this is one of the most enduring poems in the British school system, for example. 

Joe: , in 1817, when this poem is being written and published, the first French Empire had kind of reached its peak, the Napoleonic Wars had ended in 1815.

That sense of where the next great empire and I use that word great and inverted commas because obviously I don't think that's really a word [00:13:00] that's appropriate for us to be using for expansionist empire, but in terms of the world power of its day. There was a sense, I think, after the collapse of Napoleon, that that title was up for grabs, that that position in the world, that ability to shape the world in your own image, was to be determined.

And of course, when we look back at this, we might look at sort of the 1810s, the 1820s as the early years of what went on to become the British Empire and occupy that space to fill that void. So I think to read the poem for us, looking back at the British Empire, which of course no longer exists, but whose legacy kind of remains controversial, remains current in our sort of modern public consciousness, is fascinating because That's one empire that we know for a fact Shelley was not writing about because it hadn't yet really existed in the form that it went on to and yet it still has parallels and that for me is the power of the poem.

Maiya: And let's not forget too that Shelley wasn't writing truly from a disenfranchised perspective. [00:14:00] He grew up in an aristocratic family, he attended Eton and Oxford in the UK, some of the leading educational institutions. But he was a political radical. So this poem is very much rooted not in class and disenfranchisement, but actually almost written from the inside out, which I think makes this poem so powerful 

Joe: you're absolutely right when you say that. Shelley's early life in particular at Eton and at Oxford would have had him surrounded by people who would go on to control the levers of power in Britain. You know, people who would hold massive influence, people whose family members already wielded huge influence.

So that ability to frame the collapse of empire from a position of access to the powerful is a really interesting perspective, the one I think we don't often get. 

Maiya: And that's the point that I think this poem touches on so well is that not only does Shelley take that access, but he's actually able to re situate it. I mean, let's talk about the desert. Take one of our earlier episodes. We talked about Wordsworth. So if listeners haven't [00:15:00] had a chance to check that one out yet, I highly recommend you do. We talked about the impact that he had on the Lake District, which is an area of massive natural beauty in the UK. This is so far removed from that.

This is not only in a foreign country, but you really get this sense of boundlessness. This desert is absolutely isolating for the figures that stand within it. And I think Shelley's ability to kind of transpose what is a very current and fresh topic onto a completely different landscape is one of the things that makes this poem so enduringly powerful. 

Now, not only do Poetry+ members get unrivaled access to the site, they will also receive every weekend a personalized newsletter that contains poetry news, a poem of the week, book recommendations, and a personalized commentary from our very own [00:16:00] Jo. 



Joe: Welcome back to this episode of Beyond the Verse, where Maiya and I are discussing Percy Shelley's Ozymandias. And just before the break, Maiya was talking a little bit about the significance of the desert, especially when viewed through the lens of the romantic tradition to which Shelley belongs.

I just like to linger on that point a moment more, because as we're going to discuss in this poem a little bit later, Shelley's desert is important because The implication is that it was not always there, or not always there in the way that it is currently. And what I mean by that is, later when we get a bit of Ozymandias direct speech, he makes an allusion to his works, and specifically he says, look upon them as though there was, once upon a time, something else around this broken statue.

The sense that the desert, it's not merely something that's been barren and kind of inhospitable for, millennia, but the idea that the desert is perhaps some kind of apocalyptic world almost we could [00:17:00] almost we could almost draw a correlation between The kind of greenery the countryside that Maiya mentioned before the break as described in wordsworth's poetry and the desert.

It's almost as though Shelley is saying that when empires collapse the landscape in which they exist also kind of Falls away decays and until there's nothing left. It's almost as though the sand is not merely sand but actually the remnants of a lost empire But the implication seems to be that the same kind of geological changes could happen were other empires to collapse It's not merely a societal change, but almost a change within the natural world as well And I love the ability he has to do that

Maiya: And just to jump ahead, actually, to those final lines, and I'll just repeat them for the benefit of listeners. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away. And actually the word I'd like to focus on there is level, because there is not even a slight insinuation that, any city, any remnant of civilization [00:18:00] remains. The sands are low and level. You can picture it so clearly, this real sense of flat, expansive, boundless desert. And I really, really think in a very abstract way, this creates a real sense of quiet, And peace, as compared to the more tyrannical, description we get of Ozymandias.

Now this serves to do two things, at least for me. One is to actually amplify and the size of that statue, because if the city has been levelled, and yet there are remnants of this statue still, this statue must have been absolutely immense.

And I think what that does is then further add to this proclamation that is inscribed on this statue. Look on my works ye mighty and despair. The sense of the godlike in this, the fact that this statue to almost be not only in conversation with the gods, but perhaps [00:19:00] almost risen up to a level where Ozymandias can almost look them in the eye.

You really get this sense of height and elevation. 

Joe: I find that the brief glimpse we get into Ozymandias's direct voice to be so fascinating there's so much to get into here but on the inscription itself I think while I was doing the research this episode I realized that 

Actually, Diodorus Siculus comes up again here because the inscription we find in this poem is a reworking of the inscription that he found in the statue itself. So again, we're looking at layers of narrative here. We're looking at accounts that have been merged and changed and embellished for different artistic reasons.

I just like to read the inscription that he found on the statue, the real inscription, because I think the changes that Shelley makes to it are absolutely fascinating. Diodorus wrote that the inscription read, King of kings, Ozymandias am I. If any want to know how great I am and where I lie, let him outdo me in my work.[00:20:00] 

And I think the subtle differences between those are fascinating because again, the original inscription clearly offers a challenge. But compared to Shelley's, there is at least the sense of. admission that there will be empires after me who can challenge me.

There will at least be other great men and great rulers who might lay claim to being the greatest or most powerful, etc, etc. Shelley's look on my works ye mighty and despair leaves no sense of that. There is no sense whatsoever that Ozymandias feels as though his equal will ever exist. And again, These lines give us such an interesting insight into Shelley's perception of what these kind of autocrats think about themselves, how they perceive of their own power.

And again, I can't help but think of the moment in which Shelley himself was living, Because Shelley lived and grew up in the shadow of this figure of Napoleon, this man who cast this long shadow across Europe, a military ruler, a tactician, someone whose legacy remains incredibly iconic to this day. I mean, there was a [00:21:00] biopic of made of him just this year. The public fascination with this figure remains. And just a little bit of an anecdote. I was actually lucky enough to be in Egypt almost a year ago exactly on holiday. And one of the things I was surprised to see amongst all these ancient ruins was all of the reminders of Napoleon.

Napoleon's army had been to Egypt and the amount of graffiti, the amount of times his name had been literally stamped upon these ancient artifacts. I mean, it's kind of horrible in some respects, but when I think about this poem, I think what Shelley is able to do is almost do a really brief character study into the ego that drives these, I use the word again advisedly, these great leaders.

And they are often male leaders because that sense of almost. A warped or embellished belief in their own divinity, I think is something that's really striking and quite horrifying to observe.

Maiya: I mean, my God, let's just compare the fact that Ozymandias self describes as king of kings in this poem, and yet by the person that finds him, he is described [00:22:00] as a colossal wreck.

Joe: We get these different figures in this poem. We get the figure of the speaker, who speaks very briefly at the beginning. We get the figure of the traveller, who we know is sort of an anonymised version of Diodorus Siculus. We get the sculptor. All of these figures are unnamed.

We then have the contrast with Ozymandias. And again, at first glance, this seems to be about embellishing the power of the titular figure. This idea that great people's names live on through history and, you know, 99. 9 percent of us, you know, fade into the ether. And yet, and yet Shelley is doing something subtly different.

Because again, when you have a figure like Ozymandias who actually uses his own name as evidence of his power. It also speaks to a degree of irony because we're looking at a statue that's broken and actually we need the use of the name because we don't know who this person is.

He needs to introduce himself because we are ignorant of him. So in many ways that presence of his name serves to emphasize his power in relation to those who are nameless. And yet through the passage of time, which humbles everybody and [00:23:00] brings his empire down, the fact his name is there is actually really useful because otherwise we might have no idea who he was.

And I love the way that Shelley is able to use the same word, you know, his name to both accentuate his power on the one hand and kind of undermine it and devalue it on the other.

Maiya: I think that's such a great point. And actually, one of the questions that I've always had about this poem, and perhaps you might be able to, to give me some advice on where to sit with it, is so much of this poem is very, very intentional from Shelley.

You really see the way in which he manages to unpack power and hubris and empires. But I've always wondered in those sort of closing lines But he very directly juxtaposes, look on my works ye mighty in despair, with no thing beside remains. I do often wonder if that is a commentary on the fact that unbridled power results in just as much destruction as it does creation, or whether it's simply a [00:24:00] commentary on the fact that his power has lapsed and now there is nothing.

I'd really love to know kind of where you stand on that.

Joe: I mean, it's a really, really interesting question. I think at first glance there appears to be kind of a leveling, Of the great men and the less great men and again for listeners i'm using that word advisedly because Shelly is suggesting kind of in that almost shakespearean way You know a king may pass through the belly of a peasant because we all end up in the same place We all end up in the ground and everything we've built whether big or large will eventually fade to nothing So on the one hand, I think he's not suggesting that these powerful rulers are more likely to Leave a destructive legacy than anything else.

But I think one of the things that he is doing which I think You It's quite subtly done, is that when you have these rulers who leave behind enormous works, enormous reminders of their power, when that power is no longer theirs, when it is inherited either by an individual or a series of individuals, the only recourse those people seem to [00:25:00] have is to outdo that which came before them.

and to make bigger statues and to make bigger temples and to make bigger sort of reminders of their own importance. And again, without wishing to just make this a podcast about a holiday that I took, one of the things I was really struck by when I was in Egypt was how many times you would see statues that had been Not destroyed, because that would have been considered disrespectful, but where a bigger statue had simply been built in front of it, or an obelisk had been deliberately put somewhere so that you couldn't see the one that your father, grandfather, aunt, grandmother had made.

And that sense of trying to outdo those who came before you does create a sense of, of churn, and everybody thinks that they're the one who's going to last. But of course, as soon as people are dead and the next generation takes over, they're the ones who are looking to supplant you. And I think what Shelley might be saying is that the greater lengths these rulers go to enshrine their own greatness, the more they ensure the fact that somebody will work harder to outdo them. 

Maiya: Do you know what, you know, coming off the back of that, I think it's really telling actually [00:26:00] when you remember that this is a comparative poem. Obviously, Shelley and Horace Smith wrote this as a sonnet exercise. And also I think we should touch on that shortly is that this is a sonnet. We've talked about the sonnet form in previous episodes and there are many reasons why it's important that a poem about decay and transience is actually formed as a sonnet.

, but back to my original point, which is effectively, when you compare Horace Smith's Ozymandias to Shelley's , I would argue that Smith's version Is a little bit more forthright, a little bit more telling. But the lines that really stick with me from it are actually his closing lines. Effectively, in Smith's poem, you have the same journey. There is a hunter who is exploring this forgotten land. And comes across some fragment huge and stops to guess what powerful but unrecorded race once dwelt in that annihilated place. Now as I say this is much more forthright than [00:27:00] Shelley's poem.

I think if I had to say I had a preference it would be for Shelley's. But what Smith really focuses on, I think for me, is the very well known phrase, history is recorded by the winners, right? And you're looking at an incredibly powerful figure, Ramesses II, who had this great and powerful legacy, and as you say, taking great with a pinch of salt. What Smith does is really drill down into that sense of record and that sense of history. lasting legacy based on what people will take down of you. Now all we have of Ozymandias and Shelley's poem is simply, Look upon my works. There is no description of those works, there is no recorded evidence of those works, all you have is that desert space. And yet in Smith's poem the description again is different. The king of kings, this mighty city, shows the wonders of my hand. The city's gone. The fact that in [00:28:00] Smith's poem there is an implication of a city, Shelley's there is not, again, adds to this sense that Shelley's beliefs in many ways were far more resolute, and far more concrete in the way he decided to describe empire, and I really, really enjoy the fact that, But as a comparative poem, both of these poems offer so much about this single history that actually can take two entirely different renditions of Rameses II just by reading one of these. And the Ozymandias that Shelley knows is so vastly different from the Ozymandias Smith knows, even though they are writing at the same moment in time, for the same magazine, with the same form. So I ask you, why is the sonnet form important 

Joe: I think my answer actually relates to that word record that you mentioned, uh, while you were talking about Horace Smith's term, but I'll touch upon the sonnet [00:29:00] first and I think Without wishing to generalize too much and if listeners are interested in more information about the sonnets I really encourage those listeners who are interested in learning more about sonnets to go and check out the episode we did on Shakespeare's 154 sonnets as well as Elizabeth Barrett Browning's How Do I Love Thee because we really delved into the form and the way it changes and evolves in those episodes.

But just to be sort of slightly reductive, I think we tend to think of the sonnet as a love poem. We tend to think of it as something that expresses kind of adoration. Now, I love the way in which horace smith and shelley's use of it kind of twist what that means because on the one hand We could be thinking about the sonnet form as being a kind of evocation of Ozymandias love for himself and his own works, his own creation.

On the other hand we could think of it as being purely a sense of irony, the idea that this poem is used to describe love. Ordinarily it's here used to describe things that feel very distant from love, decay, death, the passage of time, etc. But one thing that perhaps is a subtle link is that so many sonnets that explore love Focus on the momentary, the fleeting, that moment of affection, that moment of beauty that [00:30:00] fades with the passage of time.

And what many of Shakespeare's sonnets doing is focusing in on the way that beauty changes through time. I mean, one of the things that we spoke about in that episode is how some of Shakespeare's early sonnets to the fair youth are imploring him to reproduce because he knows that his beauty will not last long.

He needs to pass that beauty on to the next generation. That that sense of the fleetingness. of human experience is kind of on steroids here, if you will, because what we're looking at here is not an individual's physical beauty, but we're looking at a legacy of a lifetime. So yes, the time periods we're looking at are longer here, we're looking at hundreds and thousands of years, but the central conceit is the same.

Your beauty physically will fade in a matter of 10, 20, 30 years. Your legacy as a ruler will fade within the space of 100, 200, 300 years. Your status is one of the greatest rulers of all time. will fade perhaps in a thousand years, but it will fade nonetheless. And I think that's one of the things that the sonnet is doing really interestingly. But if I may just quickly return to that use of the word record you [00:31:00] mentioned. And I think this is a really interesting way in which Shelley's poem, I think, does have greater depth perhaps than Smith's. Because what Shelley is doing by mediating the image of Ozymandias through these different sources, some of them historical, some of them artistic, some of them sort of apocryphal perhaps, and some of them seemingly direct.

We have these myriad range of sources about this man and yet it's his poem that is perhaps the strongest conception of who this man really was. We get more of a sense of personality of who this guy was in this poem than we perhaps had for thousands of years before this poem was written. And I think much like I said earlier on when Shelley is kind of doffing his cap to the sculptor.

And saying that it is the art which survives and therefore the artists who should be celebrated. I think what he is doing here, Shelley, is he is sort of emphasising the importance of the artists of the day. Not only because they are able to shine a light on the rights, the wrongs, the ills of society, but also because the people, the great men who exist in [00:32:00] society, will be mediated through their work. You know, we think about the portrayals of Caligula without thinking about the novels of Robert Graves, for example.

You think about conceptions of Julius Caesar or Richard II, and so much of that is about Shakespeare, not about what and anything they did in their real lives. And I think what Shelley is doing here is He's kind of firing a warning shot at the great rulers of his time to say actually regardless of what you do, it is people like me who will define your legacy, not anything you do in your own life.

So I'd love to get your thoughts on that notion of mediating history through art. But also, I mean, what do you think about the importance of the sonnet form?

Maiya: As you say, Shelley is much, much bolder in his assertions in his poem. And actually, as you were speaking then, I was just thinking about truly what the sonnet form does represent.

And here, I think you could potentially trade general expectations of love, being in a sonnet form, for respect. Because as I was comparing the two, it struck me [00:33:00] that Smith's poem actually owes much more respect to Ozymandias. There is a sense of respect for the power that he had. You look at a powerful but unrecorded race. Even the fact that the captioning of the, of the stone is the wonders of my hand. He talks about the lost city as a forgotten Babylon. Now, Horace Smith, let us know, was not a poet. He surrounded himself as we were discussing before this podcast with many, many greats. Now, I don't have the number to hand, but he didn't publish that many things. So yes, there is much more respect owed to Ozymandias in Smith's poem. By contrast, Shelley is bold. Shelley is absolutely undermining the power that Ozymandias had. One of the key examples of this that I think is worth touching on is actually positioning. We talk about the importance of place, the importance of the desert, the importance of narrative voice, but in Smith's Ozymandias, you have the same [00:34:00] vast stone legs, however there is no mention of Ozymandias face in Smith's poem. The leg has the same sense of scale, the same sense of enormity, and casts a shadow that the desert only knows. There is a real sense of darkness that goes hand in hand with the power that this huge, huge figure of history has. However, what Shelley does, in order to undermine that power even further, Is take the same legs, but actually take the face that, obviously, in form would have been above those legs and place it half sunk in the sand. That, aside from anything else, I think is a huge disrespect to this figure. That could not be clearer to really disrespect authority figures at the time. But really, to answer your core question, which was about the sonnet form, I think that is where the difference lies. I think you can explore a sonnet by means of love, by means of some level of transience, like Shakespeare's sonnets that [00:35:00] actually take decay as something that needs to be preserved, as a beauty that needs to be held. And what I think the sonnet form does for really both poems here, but maybe slightly stronger in Shelley's, is offer a reverence and a respect that can either be constructed or deconstructed. I think it's very important that we touch on the fact that Shelley's Ozymandias is technically structured as a Petrarchan sonnet. However many lines of thought around this sonnet are based on the fact that he actually corrupts the sonnet form. He changes the rhyme scheme.

Although he sticks to the same line formations, the rhyme scheme is really quite off putting in many ways. And I think that, again, just translates into this absolute disrespect for power and institution and tradition, more importantly.

Joe: You mentioned earlier on the colossal wreck And I think I love these two words because I think there is a [00:36:00] real sort of subtlety imbued within them because we might look at that word colossal and simply think about something large.

But we can't look at that word without thinking about where it comes from and it comes from the word Colossus, in particular the Colossus of Rhodes, which is one of these great statues, these great symbols of the classical world. So it does not simply mean something vast and big, but also something innately impressive.

And of course refers to another statue, like the one of Ozymandias in this poem. And I think the use of that word next to the word wreck obviously creates a kind of oxymoronic effect for the reader, which is a really sort of satisfying thing to read, but also speaks to the fact that within our conception of greatness and what greatness is is baked in a kind of awareness that when the fall happens, when the collapse happens, it will be big enough to justify the greatness, if that makes sense. You know, the bigger you are, the harder you fall, etc, etc. There's almost that sense that when these rulers build bigger, expand further, all they [00:37:00] are really doing is preempting the humility that they'll have to be, sort of, accept when those empires collapse, because it won't collapse.

By 10 it will collapse back down to its beginning. So the greater the thing you have created the bigger a wreck It will go on to become when it is destroyed. 

As we draw towards the end of this episode, I'd like to just think a little bit about the importance of Shelley's relationships with other writers. You mentioned, of course, that this poem comes from a very deliberate contest with Horace Smith. And I think, you know, for any listeners who want to learn more about Shelley, they .

. They can also subscribe to Poetry+ at poemanalysis.com and they can get the Percy Shelley, PDF. They can also get PDF on the other Romantic Poets if they want to think about the way those people were engaging with his work. But I'd just like to sort of zoom out slightly and go back a couple of years before this poem was written.

So as I mentioned earlier on, Shelly eloped with Mary Godwin and they married and she became, his wife, Mary Shelley, who of course wrote the novel Frankenstein. And again, that novel comes out of a very particular moment of artistic collaboration. So. If you [00:38:00] can just sort of cast your minds back to the summer of 1816, you have a very, very bad vacation because an eruption from a volcano in Asia had caused there to be no sunshine for an entire summer in Lake Geneva, and you have Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron and John Polidori, this group of writers who are collaborating, who are exploring what it means to be writing against their contemporary moment. The gloomy nature of their surroundings, the darkness of that summer inspired them to have a ghostwriting competition and from that eventually came the novel Frankenstein.

But I'd like to just think about the way in which there are some common threads between those stories. So not only did Mary Shelley write Frankenstein out of that environment, but also John Polidori wrote the novel The Vampire, which is the first example of a vampire story being written in english So it's an incredibly kind of influential moment in time and as i've said again That is just one year before shelly writes ozymandias.

Frankenstein, of course is a novel about regretting the thing you create. The thing you create almost being the thing that destroys you. [00:39:00] And, you know, perhaps we can look at parallels between that and this poem about Ozymandias's desire for his own legacy is ultimately the thing that makes him look ridiculous, because his legacy is belied by the fact that it does not survive.

But also, of course, the way in which those stories are mediated through other voices. I mean, the novel of Frankenstein is a Tale told by Victor Frankenstein to a captain in letters back home to his sister and again that sense of distance I wonder is there something about That moment in time or is it something sort of more universal about our desire to be together?

view stories that we don't perhaps fully comprehend through the eyes of others? I mean, big question, Maiya, but what do you think about that? Is there any kind of connection with that particular contemporary moment or is that something more universal? Why do we feel the need to create distance, whether temporal or geographic, between ourselves and the figures that we are fascinated by but perhaps struggle to understand?

Maiya: I think you've definitely touched on something that, you know, maybe is looking back a [00:40:00] commonality but maybe not 100 percent intentional at the time. I think it really leads back to the point I was making earlier about sometimes it is so much harder to write when you are entrenched within something because you have to write your way out of it.

If you are already outside you almost occupy the position of an observer. You are someone who is given certain artistic liberties and artistic freedoms to create narrative where you observe because you're not within it. If you fundamentally know how structures of power work, you know, in Shelley's case, if you know how elitist institutions work, you then have to find a way to negotiate, in no uncertain terms, how to work your way out of those in order to then create commentary on them. And I think that's really my answer to your question there, is that in order to create commentary, sometimes you have to create distance, sometimes you have to write your [00:41:00] way out of these things and as you so aptly mentioned, all of these writers are creating work at a time of great political turmoil with increasingly powerful figures. I think one thing that I'd actually really like to pay attention to within kind of the scope of the question you just asked me is the fact that many of these stories that came outta this singular summer seemed so vastly different. Obviously, you have Frankenstein, in which there is a creator and a created monster. And then Polidori's the vampire perhaps seems to occupy a very different Strain of literature. Obviously, this is a brand new creation at this point. However, I would like to touch on the fact that, really, all of these, Ozymandias, Frankenstein, The Vampire, are really just iterations and questions that concern immortality. The Vampire has a huge, huge standing in literature to this day. I mean at Twilight. This is a [00:42:00] story that has been rewritten thousands of times and has a massive, massive influence in just our social culture, really. But it is about immortality.

It's about bearing the brunt of history. same goes for Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. It is about a creator who has unbridled power, creates a monster, and then has the question of then what to do with it. What are they then left with? Exactly the same goes for Ozymandias. And that is why I think, my answer to your question is really, they have created distance because it is a very real and troubling question they're dealing with. So in order to explore it with any sort of lack of bias or they then have to create the distance from it. Let's not forget obviously, Mary and Percy were probably sat in the same room writing. They were very often editing each other's work, they were discussing it over dinner, you have a real intimate relationship between the two [00:43:00] of them that will have undoubtedly influenced one another's work.

So, when I explore something like Frankenstein in conversation with a poem like Ozymandias, there are so many themes that run through the two of them that you can't ignore the fact that they come from a central sphere, a central moment, or perhaps even just one singular conversation.

Joe: I love the way that you have drawn that connection between Frankenstein and this poem because I was thinking about it kind of in terms of narrative voice and about the distance I mentioned, but I love the comparison you've made between the creation of Frankenstein's monster, Frankenstein's creature, whatever you want to call it, and kind of Ozymandias less literal but kind of symbolic creation of his own legacy.

Because what those two stories kind of share is the fact that Even though you create something, you do not control what it then goes on to do and become. And there is that sense of being horrified by your own creation, which I think is a really lovely comparison point. I mean, if Ozymandias could be shown his legacy a [00:44:00] thousand years later, maybe even a hundred years later, we don't know.

There is that sense that he'd be horrified by it. Because when you create something, you kind of feel like you have a right to it and a right to shape what it goes on to do. In the case of a legacy, well, it, it's going to be shaped by the people who take it on. But in terms of Frankenstein, Frankenstein's monster is a thinking, active being in its own right, who does not want to simply be a conduit for its creator's greatness.

It wants to be its own thing. I mean, you know, we could do a whole episode, I'm sure, but we're on. the ways in which Shelley's work intersects with his wife's, which intersects with Byron's, and, you know, we could, we could talk for hours on that, but just thinking, sort of, from a broader lens here to finish off the episode, thinking about where this poem goes in the future.

You and I both encountered this poem at school for the first time. It remains hugely prominent in the British education system, it's influenced many, many writers, of course, one of them being William Butler Yeats, enormously.

Shelley's reputation wasn't kind of huge during his own [00:45:00] lifetime, but has grown steadily and certainly since about the 1950s, 1960s. You know, he has become in retrospect, one of Britain's finest poets. His works are read very, very widely, hugely influential. But looking at this poem in particular, the thing perhaps that I admire most about it, and if listeners haven't got the sense by now, there are many things I admire about it, but it's that character study.

It's that ability to look into the eyes of somebody that has been dead for thousands of years, And find the characteristics, the commonalities between him as a man, not as a pharaoh, not as a ruler, but as an individual egotist. and find the commonalities between that man and people that were alive in Shelley's time, and perhaps even more impressively, people who wouldn't be born for years after Shelley's death.

I mean, it is not a big jump away from Ozymandias's claim that he is the king of kings. It is not a big jump from there to things like the Third Reich that will last a thousand years in Nazi Germany. That kind of ego, the way in which the cult of personality that exists today in dictatorships like North Korea, [00:46:00] where the leader is not simply a powerful, talented, or brutal, or whatever word you want to use, political force, but they are somehow transcending the human race.

That ego, that hubris, is something that Shelley was able to identify in a figure he would never see, and nobody had ever seen, because they'd been dead for thousands of years, find commonalities with dictators in his own period, people like Napoleon, and also sort of foreshadow the way in which leaders hundreds of years later would conceive of themselves, and for me that is a legacy that few poems can contend with. 

Maiya: I mean, what an incredibly insightful way to end this episode. Thank you so much, Joe. I feel like I've learned so much from this episode, even though this was a poem that I kind of thought I was familiar with in a strange way. Unfortunately that is all we have time for today, but next time I'm very excited. We will be discussing because I could not stop for death by Emily Dickinson

If you cannot wait for that episode to come out, I highly recommend you go to poemanalysis.com to do your own [00:47:00] exploration. There are many of her poems on the site, and if you want to learn a little bit more about what we're talking about today, go check out Ozymandias 2. Don't forget, you can sign up for a Poetry+ membership that will give you unparalleled access to learn all you can about poetry, from meter to rhyme scheme to bespoke analysis. 

Mai: But for now, it's goodbye from me.

Joe: And goodbye from me and the whole team at poemanalysis.com and Poetry+.