Ozymandias

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1818

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Literary Context: Romanticism

Shelley’s identification with Romanticism, an artistic and literary movement, is observable both in his literary contributions (including “Ozymandias”) and the biographical details of his life. Romanticism originated in France and Britain in the early 1800s, and its adherents emphasized ideals such as the power of the imagination, the importance of emotion, and the power of nature.

“Ozymandias” reflects all of these ideals. The poem’s imagery contrasts descriptions of the desert, where the statue exists, with the concrete example of the manmade statue; the placement of the statue against this landscape highlights the superiority of nature, which, slowly but surely, is overpowering the monumental efforts of one man to be immortalized and defy the passage of time.

The sheer size of the statue hints at another Romantic notion, that of the sublime; the word “sublime” describes a moment in which an individual experiences emotional overwhelm as a result of confronting the majesty of nature, and the image of the ruined statue in the desert invites such a response. More impressive than the statue, according to the Romantic notion of the sublime, is the seemingly endless expanse of desert that appears to consume the statue’s ruins as the natural stone wears down into grains of sand, returning the monument, a testimony to human power, to its earthbound origins.

Shelley’s descriptions of the statue’s face is also evidence of the Romantic influence. Though inanimate, the statue has human characteristics: to the speaker of the poem, the statue frowns and reveals an emotional coldness within. Shelley’s choice to examine the emotions of a centuries-old monument reveals his determination to understand the ways humans interact with the world and their surroundings.

Romanticism, as a literary lens through which a reader can read and understand Shelley’s sonnet, puts the challenging notion of human frailty at the forefront, with its central image of the enormous statue in pieces. The statue’s state of disrepair suggests the disrepair of every human, who must live with the anxiety-provoking understanding that time will always march on, no matter one’s position in society. Deterioration and death come to all.

Historical Context: Colonialism in the 1800s

Shelley’s sonnet was published in 1818, the year when the statue on which “Ozymandias” is based was first brought to Shelley’s home country of England.

Funded by Sir Henry Salt, the British Consul to Egypt, Italian engineer Giovanni Battista Belzoni and his team of excavators brought the 9-foot head of the statue, called ‘the young Memnon’ after a character in Homer’s Iliad, from Egypt to England in 1818. The French had attempted to move the head before Salt and Belzoni made their attempt, but were not successful. Belzoni was able to move the head from its desert location to the Nile using basic technology like levers, wheeled platforms, and ropes. The statue in its original form had stood at the entrance of a 13^th century mortuary temple built by Rameses II in the Theban Necropolis. Belzoni’s career as a de facto archaeologist progressed as his interest in Egyptian antiquities deepened, and he competed with other Europeans to find pieces to send back to Europe until his death in Mali in 1823.

The head of young Memnon remains in the British Museum in London, and now serves as a reminder of the Eurocentric, and often racist, views of this time period. Literary scholar Edward Said made the assertion that part of the European attraction to relics like the statue of the young Memnon stemmed from French and English attitudes to the East. The enormous statue was fascinating to them because it showed that an Eastern culture was capable of technological and artistic achievement on a grand scale, something they previously doubted. To this day, the statue remains a testament to both the power of the pharaoh Rameses II and to the colonial powers that enabled the monument to be moved to a London museum.