Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley: GCSE poem guide

This is ‘Ozymandias’ by Percy Bysshe Shelley, from the Power and Conflict cluster of the AQA anthology. I’m Hannah, and I teach English. The question we’ll answer: How does every part of ‘Ozymandias’ show that a ruler’s power does not last? We’ll go through the context, the poem section by section, one quotation explored closely, a model paragraph, the quotations to learn and which poems to compare it with. First, the context.

A Romantic poet. Shelley was one of the Romantic poets, who wrote in England in the late 1700s and early 1800s about strong feeling, ordinary people and the natural world. An age of revolution. In 1789 the people of France rose up against their king. Many young English writers hoped that ordinary people everywhere would win more freedom.

Shelley and tyranny. Shelley hated tyranny and the power of kings. In ‘Ozymandias’ (1818) all that is left of a mighty king is a broken statue in the desert. Ramesses II. Ozymandias is the Greek name for the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II, who ruled over 3,000 years before the poem and built huge statues of himself.

Here’s the poem. Read it with me. 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.” Lines 1 to 5: The broken statue. “I met a traveller from an antique land”.

A frame narrative: the speaker only repeats a traveller’s story, so the king reaches us second-hand, already distant and reduced. “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone”. The adjective “vast” shows the size of the king’s ambition; “trunkless” shows it broken. Size and ruin sit side by side. “Half sunk a shattered visage lies”.

The face that once commanded people is now half buried. The reader sees a ruler brought down to the level of the sand. “sneer of cold command”. Shelley hated tyranny. The sibilant “sneer” and the harsh “cold command” sum up a cruel ruler, the kind of king the Romantics wanted gone.

Lines 6 to 8: The sculptor’s work. “Tell that its sculptor well those passions read”. The sculptor saw through the king. An ordinary worker understood the tyrant’s character and recorded it in stone for ever. “Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things”.

Irony: the king’s passions “survive” only because a craftsman carved them. The art outlasts the man and his power. “The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed”. Parallel phrases: the sculptor’s hand “mocked” (copied and made fun of) the king, while the king’s heart “fed” his own cruelty. “The hand that mocked them”.

Like the French revolutionaries Shelley admired, an ordinary person has the last laugh at a king, quietly, through his art. Lines 9 to 11: The inscription. “And on the pedestal, these words appear”. The volta: the poem turns from the statue to the king’s own words. We now hear the tyrant speak for himself.

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings”. The possessive pronoun “My” and the title “King of Kings” show pride and a claim to rule over every other ruler. “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”. An imperative and an exclamation: he orders other rulers to despair. The reader now sees the order is absurd, because his works have gone.

“ye Mighty”. A warning to the kings of Shelley’s own time: whatever they build, their power will end as this pharaoh’s did. And lines 12 to 14. “Nothing beside remains”. A short, blunt sentence after the proud claim, with a caesura after it.

The pronoun “Nothing” answers the king’s “my Works”. “colossal Wreck, boundless and bare”. Alliteration links the king’s “colossal” statue to the “boundless” desert: the desert is bigger, and it wins. “The lone and level sands stretch far away”. The poem ends on nature and time, not on the king.

The reader is left looking at emptiness, where his empire stood. “The lone and level sands”. A Romantic ending: nature is the lasting power. Shelley suggests every tyranny, including those of his own day, will be levelled like this. So, to sum it up in one sentence: Shelley uses the broken statue and the empty desert to show that a tyrant’s power, however proud, is destroyed by time and nature, while the art made by an ordinary sculptor survives.

One quotation, explored closely: “The lone and level sands stretch far away”. Try it yourself first: method, zoom in, effect, and the context or purpose. Method: Alliteration in the last line of the sonnet, with no pause from start to finish. Zoom in: “lone” tells us nothing else is left. “level” means flat: the desert has worn everything down.

Effect: The long, slow line makes the reader see sand going on for ever. The king’s statue is a tiny broken thing inside it. Purpose: Shelley, a Romantic who hated tyranny, gives the last word to nature and time. Every ruler’s power ends in the same empty sand. And here’s a model What–How–Why paragraph for the question: How does Shelley show that human power does not last in ‘Ozymandias’?

Shelley shows that human power does not last by setting the king’s proud words against the empty desert around them. After the volta, the inscription is followed by a short, blunt sentence: “Nothing beside remains”. The caesura after it makes the reader stop, as if the line has run out of things to describe. The bleak pronoun “Nothing” cancels every great work the king bragged about. The final line, “The lone and level sands stretch far away”, uses alliteration to slow the reader down, so the desert seems endless.

Shelley was a Romantic who hated tyranny. By ending with sand, he shows that time and nature are stronger than any king. The quotations from ‘Ozymandias’ worth learning by heart. “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”. The king’s proud claim, now spoken to an empty desert: his power has become a joke.

“The lone and level sands stretch far away”. Alliteration and a long, flat line: time and nature outlast any ruler. In our scheme, ‘Ozymandias’ is compared with ‘My Last Duchess’. The question: How do Shelley and Browning present men with great power, and what do they want us to think of them? In the exam you choose your own second poem, so have two or three ready for each theme.

Everything in this video comes from our Power and Conflict poetry scheme of learning for schools. If you’re a teacher, Lesson 3 of every scheme is free at btl.education. Thank you for watching.