Immediately, in Line 2, the traveler begins to describe for the speaker the ruins of a monument they encountered in the “antique land” (Line 1). The first line of the poem introduces the speaker of the poem, who meets a traveler who has come from an ancient land. The lone and level sands stretch far away.” Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,Īnd wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Who said-“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone He drowned at the age of 29 in a boating accident in 1822. Shelley’s literary and political circle was as creatively stimulating as it was messy various affairs and interpersonal conflicts characterized his free-spirited (but fraught) personal life. While Shelley was first married to Harriet Westbrook in 1810, his most well-known relationship is his affair with and subsequent marriage to Mary Shelley (née Godwin), who wrote Frankenstein at a lakeside retreat with Percy and their mutual friend, the Romantic luminary Lord Byron.
I am ozymandias free#
Shelley was a lifelong proponent of atheism, free love, republicanism, and vegetarianism. His most famous poem besides “Ozymandias” might be The Mask of Anarchy, which was inspired by the murder of nonviolent protestors by British cavalry in the Peterloo Massacre (1819). Much of Shelley’s literary career centered on politics, which occasionally crept into his poetry as well. These positions were further developed and radicalized at Oxford College, where he studied classics and was eventually expelled in 1811 for his anonymously authored pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism. Even in these early years, he was an outsider for his socially progressive views, particularly his atheism. He had happy relationships with his family as a child, particularly with his mother and sisters, but was bullied at school for the nonconformity that would characterize his literary works. Yeats, and political activists like Karl Marx and Mahatma Gandhi.
His writings achieved greater fame after he died, inspiring fellow poets like Robert Browning and W.B. He is alternately lauded as one of the finer English lyric poets and denigrated as the least talented of the so-called “second generation” of English Romantics (Shelley, George Gordon “Lord” Byron, and John Keats). “Ozymandias” has enjoyed popularity since publication, but Shelley himself has seen a more mixed reception. “Ozymandias” (the Greek name of the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II) was on trend: Ancient Egypt was popular in England at the time due to archaeological finds from Napoleon’s campaign there in the years 1798 to 1801.
Shelley, like many poets of his age, knew Greek and Latin, and was fascinated by the ancient world, though he tended to write on Greco-Roman topics rather than Egyptian. “Ozymandias” represents something of a departure from Shelley’s usual subject matter: the Romantic staples of nature, melancholy, hope, and love. Upon it there is this inscription:-‘I am Osymandyas, king of kings if any would know how great I am, and where I lie, let him excel me in any of my works’ ( The Historical Library of Diodorus the Sicilian, trans. In so great a work there is not to be discerned the least flaw, or any other blemish. This piece is not only commendable for its greatness, but admirable for its cut and workmanship, and the excellency of the stone. One of these, made in a sitting posture, is the greatest in all Egypt, the measure of his foot exceeding seven cubits. The passage described an Egyptian monument that was ancient even to its author: Shelley and his houseguest, the poet and novelist Howard Smith, challenged each other to write a sonnet based on a passage from the Roman-era historian Diodorus Siculus. Now one of Shelley’s most recognizable and widely anthologized poems, “Ozymandias” was the result of a good-natured writing contest between friends.
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