Nothing new this week - I’ve been working on some longer things - but I thought I’d share an updated version of a piece from my old blog.
It’s tempting to approach ‘Ozymandias’ as a kind of relic, like those ‘two vast and trunkless legs of stone’ standing in the desert, a monument we might poke around while on holiday out of a sense of duty but which doesn’t really speak to us. Critics, like tourists, have a habit of visiting things because they are there.
But ‘Ozymandias’ does, literally, speak. Reading it again the other day the first thing that struck me was the number of different voices involved. The poem is a kind of Russian doll, reported speech enclosed within reported speech:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . .
The ‘I’ who opens the poem is dispensible: they get ten words. Two words into the second line, someone new is already speaking. But no sooner has this traveller mentioned Ozymandias’ legs than he’s talking about the statue’s ‘wrinkled lip’ and ‘sneer of cold command’. We can already see this ‘shattered visage’ moving its mouth, alone there in the sand, like something out of a cartoon. And this is before we even get to the famous words engraved on the pedestal.
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
The final three lines are given to the traveller, but the lines from the pedestal beforehand have in effect cut them off from the rest of the text. So it’s easy to imagine them as yet another voice, or, rather as no voice at all.
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
All these different voices jostling for space make the poem surprisingly difficult to read out loud for a text which is often taught and celebrated for its simplicity. The language, true, is more natural than you often get with Shelley (Shelley is either beautifully crisp or completely unreadable). You can’t recite it ponderously like some readers imagine old poems demand you do, because the register is always changing. The range of surfaces crushed into the square block of a sonnet give the poem a kind of glassy quality, like a hunk of granite.
‘Ozymandias’ is often taught as a comment on Victorian hubris. It was written in competition with Horace Smith, whose own really quite bad version goes on to describe a hunter making their way through the ruins of a future London. Shelley was in turn inspired by reports of the ‘Younger Memnon’, a collosal head which formed part of a temple complex in Luxor. The British Consul in Cairo, Henry Salt, was shipping this head back to the British Museum at the time, though there is no evidence Shelley had seen it when writing the poem.
When the Victorians imagined the remnants of the ancient world, they saw a warning for their own future: the poem, on this reading, mocks Ozymandias’ pretensions and by implication our own.1 In the usual reading of the poem, Ozymandias’ ambitions are compared unfavourably with the sculptor’s. Unlike the rest of his mighty works, the King of King’s shattered visage is only ‘half sunk’ and, through the sculptor's skill in manipulating 'lifeless things', curiously and terrifyingly alive. Art (and by extension, poetry) wins out over tyranny.2
Yet, Ozymandias’ works do survive. Here we are talking about them. That’s the thing about words etched in stone. It is why ruins have such a hold on the imagination in the first place. They persist. Ruins speak directly, too, from the writing on huge public monumnets to private gravestones or roadside waymarkers. More words are written today than ever, but it’s still possible people in the future will remember our ancestors better than they remember us.
What survives in ‘Ozymandias’ isn’t art itself, but public art: art which has found a powerful patron to give it a plinth and the necessary, hard materials. Good stone is, after all, pretty expensive. So is lugging it about.
Ozymandias is often associated with another collosus, which is still in the Ramusseum, lying on its side. The Ramusseum is one of the most incredible ruins I have ever seen, partly helped by the fact that we were the only tourists there, in March 2011. In retrospect, the last lines of the poem could read as a comment on what the Near East looked like after the Victorians were done filching the antiquities.
There is, if you think about it, another poet in the poem beyond Shelley.
Someone whose name I'm not remembering once described the ruin as the collaboration between human art and natural processes, or something to that effect.
Thank you for writing about this. I love Ozymandias, and it's always made me like Shelley far more than I otherwise could have, but for some reason I've never fully noticed all the different voices. You've made it come alive for me in a whole different way. Beautiful mini essay.