Desert

The principal setting of the poem is a desert, presumably somewhere in the territory that once formed ancient Egypt and so was part of Ozymandias’s (Pharaoh Rameses II) kingdom. Sand appears at both the beginning and the end of the poem: it half-eclipses the face of a once-massive statue, and it surrounds “the decay / Of that colossal Wreck” (12-13) and completely eclipses the remains of Ozymandias’s empire. Thus, the setting foregrounds the power of nature as compared to even the mightiest human beings. The “boundless and bare” (13) sands stand alone after leveling off whatever human power might have once built.

Books and Chronicles

The natural setting of the desert is framed by another, less concrete, setting that suggests an equally-durable form of power. The poem’s opening setting is wherever the original speaker meets the “traveller from an antique land” (1). If we believe this traveler to...