Poem of the Week 2024/50

 Ozymandias

I met a traveler 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 that 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.

– Percy Bysshe Shelley

Ozymandias, the person, was real; it is an antique Greek name for Ramesses II, also known as Ramesses the Great. When Napoleon invaded Egypt in the late eighteenth century, sending along artists, archeologists, & plunderers, it ignited a fascination among Europeans with Egypt, a civilization that had been old when Greece & Rome were young. But to say these things, to talk about the "reality" of Ozymandias himself, & the cultural & political context in which Egypt fascinated European writers, is to miss the point of the poem, with its layered dissection of what is really real, & what survives of that reality.

Ozymandias himself does not appear in the poem, & the poet does not even see the statue of him. He's not even looking for it. He meets a traveler, who, in the time-honored way of travelers, tells him what he has seen on his trips to far-away & fantastical destinations. And what the traveler has seen is not, of course, the long-dead pharaoh, or anything he caused to be built; he's seen a statue of the ruler. The great political power of the ruler has survived only because of artists: the traveler, who functions as a story-teller, & the sculptor, who created the monumental stone portrait. But even their work has not come down intact: the traveler tells us very little about the ruler, & the statue is both broken & half-hidden by the shifting desert sands.

What survives is not actually flattering to the pharaoh; as the poem describes the sculptor' work, we see a not particularly appealing character: not a benevolent or merciful ruler, but the frown, the wrinkled lip, the sneer of cold command. Presumably the ruler not only accepted but wanted this brutal portrayal; it must have come across to him as conveying power & superiority, while the satirical possibilities would be hidden from his egotistic view. It makes me think of Goya's portraits of the Spanish royal family, in which, to our eyes, they look coarse & stupid – but they must have approved the portrayals &, coarse & stupid though they look, the portraits might actually be flattering. Centuries of entitlement & in-breeding will do that to a family.

So the sculptor is sort of an ambiguous figure: he saw these unappealing qualities in his ruler, yet he took the commission (possibly under duress; the traveler is not telling his tale, only that of his ruined work). Is he glorifying, or satirizing, or, in some way, both at once? (This is an eternal dilemma; think of composers like Shostakovich under Stalin's rule.) The sculptor's is presumably the hand that mocked these qualities, but what does his mockery come to? The statue was still erected, to the glory of the great ruler. The statue, even with its vivid portrayal of human passions, is a lifeless thing. Yet even in fragmentary form, this artwork is all that remains of the ruler's reign: there are no remaining laws, or customs, or even stories about him; only massive broken pieces of his celebratory statue, & a boasting epitaph: yet the only "works" that survive to be looked upon by "the Mighty", or even by a common traveler, are the works of the sculptor: the works of the artist, & even those are broken & uncertain in meaning.

We don't even know why or how the statue was broken: did time just move on & as people stopped caring about the pharaohs nature took its toll? Was it vandalized, and if so, was it part of the grave-robbing of ancient Egyptian monuments, or was it some sort of political or military act? We aren't told. The sculptor is as long dead as his ruler (the ruler who was his subject), & the traveler doesn't give us that part of the story.

Only art survives. But what is it telling us? And is its message the one that was originally intended? Beyond the intentional portrayal of great political power, & the subversively accurate portrayal of the ruler's cold arrogance, the very fragmentary nature of the statue tells us something unintended by either ruler or sculptor: something about the transitory nature of even the greatest, most frightening political power, &, what is more disquieting, the transitory nature of even the greatest art.

Only art survives, but only fragments of that art, fragments whose meaning has been changed by time. The blankness of the desert sands drifts over them, burying them, or revealing them if the wind changes direction. It was Shelley who claimed that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, but there doesn't seem much reason to think their legislation is necessarily wiser & more far-seeing than the more political kind: it just has more of a chance of lasting. Shelley elegantly conveys the futility of power & permanence in his last lines, in which the colossal wreck is surrounded by the balanced alliteration of boundless and bare & lone and level: the words convey a vast yet unvarying expanse, something like a physical equivalent of endless time, stretching out flat & alone, an expanse of sand stretching endlessly on around the mighty but smashed fragments.

Like most people who know this poem, I came across it early on, in school, and it has floated for years in the back of my mind. Dread over the American disaster looming over us brought it back to mind. I took the poem from the Modern Library edition of The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley.