Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

In Ozymandias, the speaker tells of a meeting with a traveller. This traveller tells the speaker about a sculpture and a statue of some sort. The statue describes a king, Ozymandias. This complex series of descriptions that were esentially used to describe one thing, Ozymandias, seems a bit funny. I believe that it could respresent how distant the memory of this ruler is to the place he once presided over.

What is also interesting to me is the choice of the rulers names, Ozymandias. Usually, writers, in describing a ruler, would opt for names that would be familiar to a reader or that a reader would associate with majesty and power. His choice for the ruler's name could be to express that the ruler's "mighty works" have vanished. These works are so unrecognizable that his name too becomes unrecognizable.

Shelley also uses a lot of imagery that signify empitness and lack of substance to describe objects. For example, phrases such as "vast and trunkless legs of stone" or the use of a desert, an extremely remote location. This use of imagery could be connected with the "sense of despair" in the Romantic era.

In a nut shell, this sonnet tells about the inevitable end of a monarch's power and prestige. The primary question though is: who and what was Shelley referring to when he wrote this sonnet? First things first, the poem was written in 1817. From being aware of the date, I would infer that Shelley may have wrote this poem in reference to Napoleon Bonaparte because of his fall at Waterloo a couple years before the poem was written.