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click to listen to audioPercy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
Ozymandias  18171818
MS Shelley e. 4 fol. 85 r
© Bodleian Library, University of Oxford

 

Percy Bysshe Shelley's Ozymandias
1817–1818

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Bodleian Library, Oxford University
United Kingdom

Ozymandias is one of Percy Bysshe Shelley's most famous sonnets, and was first printed in January 1818. The manuscript has a draft on the reverse stating: 'My name is Ozymandias—King of Kings.' This boast is a classical quotation from the account by Diodorus Siculus of the Theban monuments of Rameses II, which had been quoted in a number of travel books of the time. The sonnet was written when the fashion for Egyptology was at its height, and the British Museum was actively collecting monuments from Ancient Egypt. It has also been suggested that the reference to the tyrant's 'vast and trunkless legs' echoed Shelley's own obsession with the condition 'elephantiasis'. Much of Shelley's poetry reveals his abiding belief in the power of human love and reason, and faith in the perfectibility and ultimate progress of man. His lyric poems are superb in their beauty, grandeur and mastery of language, all attributes exemplified by Ozymandias:

"I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart ... near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lips, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, atamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, this legend clear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my Works ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing remains beside. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

This version of the text (showing slight variants against modern editions) is taken from the autograph fair copy displayed. The leaf, with the germ of the poem drafted on its other side, comes from one of Shelley's notebooks.