Nothing In The World Will Last Forever In 'Ozymandias'

The poem “Ozymandias,” was written during a sonnet competition between Percy Shelley and his colleague Horace Smith in 1818; the subject of their competition was the statue of Ramses II arriving in London from Egypt. The poem displays the natural destruction of a once distinguished empire using words akin to, “shattered.” Percy Shelley uses irony, alliteration, and vivid imagery, in “Ozymandias,” to demonstrate how nothing will last forever, including the greatest things in the world. Shelley uses irony to explain the idea of nothing lasting forever in the world. The traveler describes the land where the statue of Ozymandias as “shattered” and “lifeless,” but Ozymandias is said to be “King of Kings.” The irony in this shows the once powerful

The traveler starts off his story by saying “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone / Stand in the desert…on the sand, / Half sunk a shattered visage lies,” shows how the once complete statue is now broken into pieces laying in the sand. The description makes it easy for the reader to imagine the vacant desert with fragments of Ozymandias in the sand. Shelley expands the idea of the collapse of the empire which once occupied the desert. The traveler elaborates on the description of Ozymandias by stating the words on the pedestal, “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; / Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” One could see that Ozymandias was not a person to be bothered as he was the king and created something astonishing. However, this astonishing item may have been destroyed as time passed, not lasting as long as the word once spoken by the king himself. Shelley ends the poem by utilizing an image of the remains of the empire. The remains being, “Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.” There is nothing to be seen for a long way, and the only thing that can be seen in the desert is the destroyed statue of Ozymandias. The greatest came to an end and remained as fragments in a place unrecognized by the public. Shelley displays his conception of the road of life to eventually disappearing into