He says that the grimace and “sneer of cold command” on the statue’s face indicate the emotions (or “passions”) of the statue’s subject is well understood by the sculptor. The traveller elucidates the expression of the statue as well. Then he elaborates the statue two vast legs of stone stand without a body, and near them, a massive, crumbling stone head lies “half sunk” in the sand. The speaker recalls that he had met a traveller “from an antique land,” who once came up with a story about the ruins of a statue from the desert of his native country. He was a pharaoh famous for the number of architectural structures he erected. Ozymandias was the name by which Ramses II was known to the Greeks. But, Shelley doesn’t explicitly say “nothing lasts forever” and “there is always hope.” He pens down a sonnet in a subtle way to explain the truth. As we all know, nothing lasts forever that means even the very worst political leaders, no matter how much they torture and inflict pain on others, all die at some point. “Ozymandias” explores the repercussions happened to the tyrant kings who are the autocratic world leaders more generally.

But in this limited space, Shelley explores a number of contemporary and relevant issues.

Since it is a sonnet, it has only fourteen lines. It got published for the first time in the 11 January 1818 issue of The Examiner in London. “Ozymandias” is a famous sonnet which was written by the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822). Here, let us go through the précis or summary of Ozymandias and see what it originally depicts. It describes a broken statue of a legendary king of ancient times, lying forgotten in the desert. Ozymandias is a well-known poem by Shelley (1818).

Ozymandias poem analysis