“Ozymandias“is a sonnet written by the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. It was first published in the 11 January 1818 issue of The Examiner of London. The poem was the result of a friendly competition between Shelley and fellow poet Horace Smith, using the subject of Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II, Ozymandias being the Greek name for the pharaoh. Both Shelley’s poem and Smith’s “Ozymandias” explore the ravages of time to which the legacies of even the greatest are subject. Ozymandias was included the following year in Shelley’s collection Rosalind and Helen, A Modern Eclogue; with Other Poems, and in a posthumous compilation of his poems published in 1826, Miscellaneous and Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley.
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Shelley began writing the poem “Ozymandias” in 1817, upon anticipation of the arrival in Britain of the Younger Memnon, a head-and-torso fragment of a statue of Ramesses II acquired by Italian archaeologist Giovanni Battista Belzoni from the Ramesseum, the mortuary temple of Ramesses II at Thebes. Although the Younger Memnon did not arrive in London until 1821 the reputation of the statue fragment had preceded its arrival in Western Europe. European attempts to acquire the 7.25-short-ton (6.58 t; 6,580 kg) fragment had been made as early as 1798, when Napoleon’s expedition unsuccessfully attempted to retrieve it.Shelley, who had explored similar themes in his 1813 work Queen Mab, was also influenced by Constantin François de Chassebœuf’s book Les Ruines, ou méditations sur les révolutions des empires (The Ruins, or a Survey of the Revolutions of Empires), first published in an English translation in 1792.
The poem has been cited as Shelley’s best-known and is generally considered one of his best works, though it is sometimes considered uncharacteristic of his poetry. An article in Alif cited “Ozymandias” as “one of the greatest and most famous poems in the English language”. Stephens considered that the Ozymandias Shelley created dramatically altered the opinion of Europeans on the king. It has been translated into Russian, as Shelley was an influential figure in Russia. The influence of the poem can be found in other works, including Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë.
“Ozymandias” has been included in many poetry anthologies, particularly school textbooks, such as AQA’s GCSE English Literature Power and Conflict Anthology, where it is often included because of its perceived simplicity and the relative ease with which it can be memorised. Several poets, including Richard Watson Gilder and John B. Rosenma, have written poems titled “Ozymandias” in response to Shelley’s work. Ozymandias gilberti, a giant fossil fish from the Miocene of California that is known only from a few fragmentary remains, was named by David Starr Jordan as an allusion to the poem. The 14th episode of the final season of Breaking Bad, covering the dramatic downfall of protagonist Walter White, was titled “Ozymandias”. A recitation of the poem by series lead Bryan Cranston was used in a trailer for the series. Ozymandias is used In a promotional short film for Bungie’s 2026 title “Marathon”, read by Ben Starr playing as Durandal.
