Literary Analysis Of Percy Bysshe Shelley's Ozymandias

In his poem “Ozymandias,” Percy Bysshe Shelley depicts an incongruous scene in which a colossal stone relic lays in ruins among a vast, empty landscape. Though on the surface, the piece has a simple meaning, the ironies and tensions hidden in the lyrics and meter are often overlooked (Martin 65). In his peculiar sonnet, Shelley uses the image of an ancient Egyptian sculpture to make a statement about the relationship between an artist, their subject, and the effects of time on both. Ozymandias came about in an amiable competition with Shelley’s close friend, Horace Smith, a banker and political writer. Smith spent the Christmas and New Year season of 1817 to 1818 at Shelley’s residence. The two, along with brothers Leigh and John Hunt (who would later publish “Ozymandias” in his newspaper: The Examiner) often challenged one another to write poems on a common subject. The two settled upon an account by the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus in which he describes a statue

“Trunkless legs of stone” and a , “Half sunk, a shattered visage…” fabricate an image of decay in the reader’s mind: the remainder of the “vast” statue, vanished, from sight and recollection. Despite the massive scale of what remains, the deteriorated form of Ozymandias’ “work” can be challenged and “outdone.” In an earlier draft, Shelley even described the remnants as, “... a single pedestal,/ On which two trunkless legs of crumbling stone/ Quiver…” (“The Complete…” 320). This illustration provided a sense of weakness and fear, not in his subjects, but Ozymandias and betrayed Shelley’s loathing towards tyrants. Through these renditions, Shelley becomes the sculptor whose “hand... mocked.” The artist had a great deal of power over his subject as he mocked him in more than one sense. The first, an older denotation of “depicting” and the second, a more common connotation of “insulting”