Ozymandias (1818). 19th century literature.

             Ozymandias

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

In this winding story within a story within a poem, Shelley paints for us the image of the ruins of a statue of ancient Egyptian king Ozymandias, who is today commonly known as Ramesses II. The poet meets a person who has been from an ancient place in deserts. He is the one who tells the poet about the ruined statue of the powerful king, Ozymandias. ItvhaThis king is still regarded as the greatest and most powerful Egyptian pharaoh. The poem talk about his desire to immortalize himself by erecting a statue. Yet, all that’s left of the statue are his legs, which tell us it was huge and impressive; the shattered head and snarling face, which tell us how tyrannical he was; and his inscribed quote hailing the magnificent structures that he built and that have been reduced to dust, which tells us they might not have been quite as magnificent as Ozymandias imagined. 

The image of a dictator-like king whose kingdom is no more creates a palpable irony. But, beyond that there is a perennial lesson about the inescapable and destructive forces of time, history, and nature.

 Success, fame, power, money, health, and prosperity can only last so long before fading into “lone and level sands.”

There are yet more layers of meaning here that elevate this into one of the greatest poems. In terms of lost civilizations that show the ephemeralness of human pursuits, there is no better example than the Egyptians—who we associate with such dazzling monuments as the Sphinx and the Great Pyramid at Giza (that stands far taller than the Statue of Liberty)—yet who completely lost their spectacular language, culture, and civilization. If the forces of time, history, and nature can take down the Egyptian civilization. 

 Ozymandias is believed to have been the villainous pharaoh who enslaved the ancient Hebrews and who Moses led the exodus from. If all ordinary pursuits, such as power and fame, are but dust, what remains, the poem suggests, are spirituality and morality—embodied by the ancient Hebrew faith.

We can correlate this Sonnet  with Shakespeare's Sonnet ' Not Marble, nor the Gilded Monuments.( Sonnet 55).In these two poems, both poets use imagery, symbol and irony to explain how possession and power remain temporarily. 

Though each of these sonnets have been written about completely unrelated subjects, they still both portray the message that everything changes with time. 

When Shelley wrote Ozymandias, he wrote the first eight lines as a story and the last six lines as a moral to the story.Shelley is telling the reader that it is not possible to try and defeat time, even with non-living possessions. The poem also depicts the impermanence of power and the permanence of art.