My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: look on my…

The line is the inscription on the pedestal in Shelley’s sonnet. A traveller “from an antique land” describes two vast, trunkless legs of stone in the desert and, near them, a shattered face half sunk in the sand, whose “sneer of cold command” shows how well the sculptor read his passions. Then come the words on the pedestal, and the landscape’s answer: “Nothing beside remains.” Round “that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Shelley wrote the sonnet at the end of 1817 in a friendly contest with Horace Smith, who wrote one on the same subject. It appeared in The Examiner in January 1818 and again in the 1819 volume Rosalind and Helen. Ozymandias is the Greek name of Ramesses II; the historian Diodorus Siculus records an inscription on his statue inviting whoever would know how great he is to surpass one of his works.

The king’s boast has become the standard caption for every ruin of ambition, quoted with an irony he did not intend.

Ozymandias, first published in The Examiner in January 1818; printed as “Sonnet” in Rosalind and Helen (1819), 1818

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work