Meri Juana

The Sonnet's Summary and Context

Shelley uses the title "Ozymandias" to refer to the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II, widely regarded as one of Egypt's most powerful pharaohs and buried in the Valley of Kings. In the poem, decaying fragments of an ancient king's statue are described in a vast desert. The statue's only remains are two upright stone legs and a "shattered" head half-buried in the sand (Shelley, 1977, lines 2-3). A bombastic inscription on the pedestal of the statue describes Ozymandias as the "King of Kings," whose mighty achievements inspire awe and despair in all who see them (Shelley, 1977, line 10). When the words in the statue's inscription "are savagely contradicted with the ruins and the location," the poem as a whole becomes a mocking "comment on the transience of power" (Walker, 2007, p. 7). The pedestal's claim takes on new ironic dimensions in this context, as one despairs not at the sight of Ozymandias' legacy, but at how the ephemerality of time renders humanity, leaving Ozymandias' words pitifully naive and empty. The statue's expression reveals arrogance as the king's primary personality trait.Ozymandias wears a "frown" and a "cold command sneer," expressions that indicate his cruel condescension towards his subordinates, being "the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed" (Shelley, 1977, lines 5-8). These "passions," which once defined the king and "still survive" on "lifeless things" (ie, the statue), demonstrate that such brutality and hollowness now exist only on the face of a broken statue (Shelley, 1977, lines 6 -7). It follows that tyranny, the evil force in human nature, breeds its own opposite, the demise." The figure of Ozymandias, as the incarnation of evil, "reinstates the idea that evil must be overthrown by itself," implying that tyranny breeds human nature's disaster. 67 (Zaman & Chakraborty, 2019).

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