The version of this poem used to create this study guide appears in: Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “Ozymandias.” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias.

Note that parenthetical citations within the guide refer to the lines of the poem from which the quotations are taken.

“Ozymandias” is a 14-line iambic pentameter poem, known as a sonnet, written by the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Written around the time of the British acquisition of the Younger Memnon, part of an ancient Egyptian statue of Pharaoh Rameses II, “Ozymandias” constituted Shelley’s contribution to a friendly competition with banker-writer Horace Smith. Both men composed sonnets based on a passage from the ancient Greek historian Diodorus Siculus regarding a colossal statue of Ozymandias, the Greek name for Rameses II. Shelley never personally laid eyes on either the Younger Memnon or the statue mentioned by Diodorus, making his poem a testament to the power of verbal inspiration, as well as the fashion for ancient Egypt in nineteenth-century England. Though Ozymandias, his works, and even the massive statue attesting to his power are long gone, the words describing that statue remain.

The poem opens with the speaker meeting an ancient traveler, who tells of a giant, fragmented statue in the middle of an otherwise empty desert. The traveler describes the statue’s legs, still standing in the sand, and its half-buried head, before relating the inscription that appears on its base. The inscription proclaims the might of Ozymandias, the king depicted in the statue, and dares other rulers to match his works. The traveler closes his story, and the poem as a whole, by noting that nothing else remains around the ruins of the statue except a vast, unending desert.