Shelley's choice of setting is insightful: the endless desert surrounding them foregrounds the legs and half-buried head of the long vanished pharaoh, whose haughty self-aggrandising epitaph is mocked because it is declaimed to a silent emptiness.
The physical desecration of Mussolini's body, post-mortem - hung upside down alongside his mistress - and the destruction of Saddam Hussein's statue in 2004, give a twentieth century symmetry to the poet's observation. The 'wrinkled lip, and sneer' of the (significantly) disembodied pharaonic head are time-transcendent indicators of dictatorial power: idiosyncrasies of arrogant incaution perceptible, more recently, in the figures of Mussolini, Hitler and Idi Amin. Imagining an ancient Egyptian scene at the time of the Pharaohs, the poet distils a complete allegory for his own time into the form of a sonnet.Īn allegory which still holds. 'I hated thee, fallen tyrant', Shelley had declared in 1816, only a year after Bonaparte's exile to St Helena, and the spleen which informs 'Ozymandias' might serviceably have been vented over the contemporary British establishment. Out of the furnace of cataclysmic social change at the cusp of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were forged poems which became social manifestos - 'Prometheus Unbound', 'Liberty' and, as a direct reaction to the Peterloo massacre of 1818, 'The Masque of Anarchy'. The impulse for effecting change was authentic in the poet, and never more effective than when his extreme solipsism, narcissism even, threatened to derail his intention. Shelley's lifelong Republican urge - his vocal support of the revolutionary dynamic and embryonic socialistic ideas - harried the establishment, who viewed him as a potential agent provocateur, and actively investigated his 'seditions'. And transience, whose depredations may elicit both elegiac longing, and consolation, is the key to an understanding of 'Ozymandias'. The ecclesiastical phrase 'Sic transit gloria mundi' - 'thus passes the glory of the world' - barely covers Shelley's insight because, along with the glorious, time's necessary transience also consigns the vainglorious to the waste bin of history. Trump are unwittingly invoking Shelley's two century old certainties. Those many who are presently wishing an early nemesis on Donald J. Well accustomed to the imperial huffings and puffings of his own generation - Napoleon Bonaparte had met his Waterloo only three years before the publication of the poem in 1818 - the poet was perceiving the end of what we might now call a dictatorship as an inevitable, and no doubt fortuitous, casualty of time.
And I don't doubt Shelley's intention when he contrived 'Ozymandias' as a cautionary tale. Nothing better inscribes a poem's value for posterity than its continued relevance. The lone and level sands stretch far away." Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!' The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,Īnd wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Who said-“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
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