Percy Bysshe Shelley was born England in 1792 and died in Italy in 1822. He is considered one of the most important English Romantic poets. His most famous poems include Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, The Masque of Anarchy, and Prometheus Unbond.

Ozymandias was first published in Leigh Hunt's Examiner of January 11, 1818 as part of a sonnet-writing competition between Shelley and Horace Smith. Both Smith and Shelley were acquaintances of Leigh Hunt, an important editor and writer of the time. This poem competed against Smith's On a Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below.

The name Ozymandias was the pharaoh Ramesses II throne name (Usermaatre-setepenre, The Justice of Re is Powerful, Chosen of Re). [1]

In the poem, the lyrical-I meets a traveller, whose only description is from an antique land. The voyager informs him -without being specifically asked- that there is a strange figure in the desert both of them are crossing over. That figure consists of two huge legs of stone without a body and, near them, a shattered face lying on the sand. On a pedestal some words can be read, telling us about the far-off story of that wrecked statue: My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nevertheless, nothing around the statue can be seen. Nothing but the irrepressible sand.

This poem is a sonnet, thus consisting of fourteen lines in iambic pentameters. The rhyming scheme is composed ABAB ACDC EDE FEF. This is certainly not the traditional sonnet-form an English reader was used to, since it encompasses a wittily interwoven structure interlinking two forms: the octave with the sestet. This rebellious attitude against the established structures comes directly from Shelley's personality, a constant in his life. He also uses half rhymes (or eye rhymes) such as stone and frown, appear and bear, disorientating the reader, forcing them to slow the pace for a measured impression.

Ozymandias is an atypical poem written by an atypical poet in an atypical time and for an atypical reason. Nevertheless, it has been considered since its first publication in 1817 a pithy masterpiece of a universal human failure: the inevitability, the individuals' ephemeral attribute, the passage of time, which is capable of encroaching on every person and ruining even the king of kings.

The whole poem is faithful to a single element: the statue. Throughout the sonnet, the description revolves around the emperor's fallen figure, therefore emphasizing the idea of the slightness of power over the years. The emperor's insane words are downgraded to obliteration and oblivion. It has not been another king who has vanquished him, since all men were subjugated to his imperial supremacy. Instead, time has shed a coat of sand capable of defeating not only the emperor's fear-provoking last words, but also his whole realm. Now the statue remains as a metaphor of the fleeting and overbearing pride dominated by the power of history. 

Shelley uses a sharp strategy in order to distance the reader from the object of the poem; here lies the traveller's importance. If the reader could attain the information from a first-hand reading, then the king of kings would not appear so far away in time and space. Thus, Shelley gives voice to an unknown traveller who talks to another unknown individual and it is this second person (the lyric-I) who retells in direct speech not only what the first one said, but the engraved pedestal's inscription. It is certainly a a witty approach which has two functions since hiding the king from the reader is another way of undervaluing the emperor's political power and transcendence.

The statue is depicted fragmentarily to eventually convey a meaningful portray not only of the statue's outer shell but also of his sculptor and his people, as shown in examples such as:  line 2 - two vast and trunkless legs; line 4 - a shattered visage, whose frown; line 5 - wrinkled lip, sneer of cold command. Once the figure of the king has been rebuilt, the sculptor is introduced as if he might be working while he is aware of the king's passions. He knows the king's inner feelings as if they were him, since he is able to stamp this zeal on these lifeless things, now spread over the sand. This apparent awareness of the King's feelings and passions is evident in the statue despite it being an inanimate object.

Now that we have obtained an image of the king's appearance and his ennobling apparatus towards history, there is only one thing lacking in order to mentally depict the empire: the people. In line 8, the emperor's subjects are concisely introduced in a passive but powerful approach: the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed. Notice that nationals, people, have loomed up from the emperor's hand and heart, diminishing them on the one hand but arousing compassion for them on the other.

Now that we are completely aware of the king's power, we are given an account of his conceited speech: My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: / look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!  This crushing sentence embodies the formal climax of the poem, working at the same time as the anticlimax. Herein the strength of the sonnet lies, for these are the most powerful words the king could have uttered after such a potent description. But the poet's wit goes further: whereas these two lines function as the formal climax in the poem, the whole empire is violently pulled down in the reader's mind, forcing him to recall the trunkless legs of stone standing in the dessert. This idea of devastation is enforced through lines 12, 13 and 14: nothing beside remains, decay / of that colossal wreck.