Ozymandias

Percy Bysshe Shelley(1792–1822)

The Examiner, 1818

I met a Traveller from an antique land,Who said, “Two vast and trunkless legs of stoneStand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:And on the pedestal these words appear:“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings.”Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair!No thing beside remains. Round the decayOf that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,The lone and level sands stretch far away.

From the first publication in The Examiner (London, 1818), taken from the facsimile transcribed on English Wikisource. The period spelling («desart», the quotation marks) is kept. In The Examiner it appeared signed with the pseudonym «Glirastes», omitted here as no part of the poem.

Public domainThis poem is in the public domain. You may read it, copy it, recite it and publish it without asking anyone.

About the poem

A traveller tells how in the desert he saw the ruins of a colossal statue: two trunkless legs of stone and, half sunk in the sand, a shattered face with a sneer of cold command. On the pedestal, an inscription: «My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair.»

And around it nothing remains: only level sand as far as the eye can see. Shelley builds the whole sonnet so that the tyrant's boast — «despair before my greatness» — reads, centuries later, as its exact refutation. The power that thought itself eternal left nothing but a wreck in the desert.