Ozymandias

Publication history

The banker and political writer Horace Smith spent the Christmas season of 1817–1818 with Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley. At this time, members of Shelley’s literary circle would sometimes challenge each other to write competing sonnets on a common subject--Shelley, John Keats and Leigh Hunt wrote competing sonnets on the Nile around the same time. Shelley and Smith both chose a passage from the writings of the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, which described a massive Egyptian statue and quoted its inscription: "King of Kings Ozymandias am I. If any want to know how great I am and where I lie, let him outdo me in my work." In the poem Diodorus becomes "a traveller from an antique land."

The two poems were later published in Leigh Hunt's The Examiner, published by Leigh's brother John Hunt in London. (Hunt was already planning to publish a long excerpt from Shelley's new epic, The Revolt of Islam, later the same month.) Shelley’s was published on 11 January 1818 under the pen name Glirastes. It appeared on page 24 in the yearly collection, under Original Poetry. Smith's was published, along by a note signed with the initials H.S., on 1 February 1818. Shelley's poem was later republished under the title "Sonnet. Ozymandias" in his 1819 collection Rosalind and Helen, A Modern Eclogue; with Other Poems by Charles and James Ollier and in the 1826 Miscellaneous and Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley by William Benbow, both in London.

Smith's poem

Shelley wrote the poem in competition with his friend Horace Smith, who published his sonnet a month after Shelley's in the same magazine. It takes the same subject, tells the same story, and makes a similar moral point, but one related more directly to modernity, ending by imagining a hunter of the future looking in wonder on the ruins of an annihilated London. It was originally published under the same title as Shelley's verse; but in later collections Smith retitled it "On A Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below".

Scansion

"Ozymandias" is a sonnet, written in loose iambic pentameter, but with an atypical rhyme scheme when compared to other English-language sonnets, and without the characteristic octave-and-sestet structure.

Themes

The central theme of "Ozymandias" is contrasting the inevitable decline of all leaders and of the empires they build with their pretensions to greatness.

"Ozymandias" represents a transliteration into Greek of a part of Ramesses's throne name, User-maat-re Setep-en-re. The sonnet paraphrases the inscription on the base of the statue, given by Diodorus Siculus in his Bibliotheca historica, as "King of Kings am I, Osymandias. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works." Shelley's poem may have been inspired by the impending arrival in London in 1821 of a colossal statue of Ramesses II, acquired for the British Museum by the Italian adventurer Giovanni Belzoni in 1816. The poem was written and published before the statue arrived in Britain, but the reports of the statue's imminent arrival may have inspired the poem. The statue's repute in Western Europe preceded its actual arrival in Britain, and Napoleon (at the time of the two poems merely a curiosity in distant St. Helena, however still fresh the impact of his own rise and fall) had previously made an unsuccessful attempt to acquire it for France.

Cultural influence

The poem has influenced the production of numerous creative works across a range of artistic disciplines. Crime novelist Robert B. Parker opens his 1981 Spenser novel Early Autumn with a full quotation of the poem. In John Christopher's The Tripods trilogy (1967), a vagrant character named Ozymandias leads the characters to rebel against the tripods, which begins the story arc. The writer Alan Moore named a superhero Ozymandias in his 1986–87 comic book miniseries Watchmen and recited the poem in the course of the story. The Uncanny X-Men comic series also features a character named Ozymandias.

The third-to-last episode of the American television series Breaking Bad, titled "Ozymandias", was directly influenced by the poem's content, and draws on the poem's theme of collapse following greatness; in a teaser trailer for the show's final eight episodes, the entire poem is recited by lead actor Bryan Cranston.

Woody Allen's films Stardust Memories (1980) and To Rome with Love (2012) use the term "Ozymandias Melancholia", which Allen defines as "the realisation that your works of art will not save you and will mean nothing down the line".