Ozymandias: the king whose name is all that is left

Who remembers Horace Smith? At the end of eighteen seventeen, he and his friend Percy Shelley agreed to write a sonnet each about the ruined statue of an ancient Egyptian king. A sonnet is a poem of fourteen lines. Two poems, one statue, one London newspaper printing both a few weeks apart. Shelley's is in your anthology. Smith's is barely read today. That is a strange fate for a poem about a king who had his name cut into stone so that nobody could forget him. You know his name. You know almost nothing else, and even the name reaches you third hand. Third hand is the clue, and the poem shows exactly who passes it on.

Here is the whole poem, short enough to hear in one go. The king's name is Ozymandias. "I met a traveller 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 shatter'd visage lies, whose frown, and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command tell that its sculptor well those passions read" "which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things, the hand that mock'd 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." In plain words, a statue of Ozymandias lies broken in the desert. First come two huge legs with no body. Then a face half buried in sand, still sneering. Then a pedestal carrying the king's boast, and around it, sand in every direction. Who actually describes the statue to us: Shelley, the traveller, or Ozymandias? The traveller. The speaker of the poem only repeats what a traveller said, so even the description reaches us second hand. Now count the people between the king and you. Ozymandias ordered the words. A sculptor carved them. The traveller read them and reported them. The speaker of the poem retells the traveller. Three people stand between the king's words and your ears, and not one of them is the king. That is what third hand means here.

Next comes the turn. A sonnet usually changes direction partway through, often after its eighth line, and that change of direction is called the turn, or the volta. Shelley's sonnet shifts at line nine, when the pedestal appears, and its sharpest turn comes at the start of line twelve. The boast fills two whole lines, and then three short words reply to it. Why put the shortest sentence in the poem straight after the longest boast? Because the gap between them is the argument. Ozymandias says his works will make the mighty despair, and the very next sentence shows there are no works left. That drop from grand to flat has a name: bathos, a build-up that collapses into something small. Here the collapse is Shelley's whole case against the king. So the sonnet form is doing a job. It gives Shelley a turn, and he spends that turn on the drop from the boast to the sand. Here are three sentences a student might write about the form. One: Shelley chose a sonnet because sonnets are about love. Two: the turn lands on the empty desert, so the boast collapses into sand. Three: the poem has fourteen lines. Which of those three would actually help an answer about power? The second. It says what the form does to the king, while the other two only say what the form is. One examiner's report describes the weaker habit. What was less successful was where students attempted to say anything meaningful about Shelley's use of sonnet form, leading to comments such as he uses a sonnet because sonnets are love poems which shows Ozymandias loves himself. The report goes on: This isn't particularly helpful as a line of argument as there isn't really anywhere to go with this idea once it has been stated. So the fix is simple to state. Name the form once and make it do work, like the turn landing on the sand, or leave the form alone.

And that answers the third-hand puzzle. Shelley never lets Ozymandias speak to you directly: a sculptor's version, a traveller's version, a stranger's retelling. A king who cannot control his own story has already lost the argument the poem is making.

Now the lines worth carrying into the exam, six of them, each with the job it does. First, what the traveller sees: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone." Trunkless means without a trunk, without a body. The first thing you meet of the great king is the part with no head and no chest. Then the face: "a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown, and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command." A visage is a face. What survives of Ozymandias is his contempt, so the expression has outlasted the man and his empire. Then the sculptor: "The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed." Mock'd means copied, with a hint of making fun. So who comes out of this poem with more power, the king or the sculptor? The sculptor. His work outlived the king, so the artist wins the argument the king thought he was having. Then the pedestal, and the boast you heard in the reading: the king's own words, though even these reach you through a sculptor and a traveller. The desert answers Ozymandias in the very next line. This is the famous line of the poem, so it earns its place when its answer sits beside it. That answer is three words long, Nothing beside remains, and it is the shortest sentence in the poem. Beside here means besides: nothing else is left. The three words sit directly under the longest boast, and the boast never recovers. And the last line: "The lone and level sands stretch far away." Why end on flat sand, rather than a storm smashing the statue? Because nature never bothers to fight Ozymandias with a storm. The sand simply outlasts him and stays there, as if the empire had never been. You may know the king's real name, Ramesses the Second. One clause of that is plenty, inside a sentence that answers the question, because the poem is about what happens to power, not about Egypt. In this cluster, Ozymandias answers questions about power best, and its last line lets it sit beside the poems about the power of nature too.

Time to see which lines have stuck. Each one comes back with its key word missing. The statue starts as two vast and what legs of stone? Trunkless. Legs with no body, so the great king begins in pieces. Now the face: a frown, a wrinkled lip, and a sneer of cold what? Command. Giving orders is the one habit still printed on his face. Try the three words that answer the boast on the pedestal. The answer to the boast is Nothing beside remains, the shortest sentence in the poem. Here's a line this video never unpacked: "Round the decay of that colossal wreck." Which word is the power? Colossal. Decay and wreck are what is left of it, so the same drop from boast to nothing happens inside one line. The king's name reached you through a sculptor, a traveller and a poet, and his empire did not reach you at all. Horace Smith's sonnet on the same statue did not even get that far.

Once you can trace who carries the king's words to you, you could teach this one; press the thumb and it's ticked off. Hazy still, park it for later, since the next poem you study makes this one easier.

Next in the chapter: My Last Duchess: a man showing a stranger the wife he had killed. Hopefully that's next in your feed, but if not, search for ScholaFly E L four oh, oh six.

Every other video is on scholafly.com too, easy to search by video code or by keyword. Whatever you're revising, go there and have a look, or, watch the next video.