"What Trumps Vain Boasts": The Wizardry of "Ozymandias" [by David Lehman]

 

Impromptu poetry competitions were not uncommon among the English Romantic poets. The poets would be given a quarter of an hour or so to turn out a serviceable sonnet on a chosen theme. In December 1816 John Keats and Leigh Hunt wrote sonnets on “the grasshopper and cricket.” Hunt’s effort holds up pretty well, but you’d have to say that Keats won with the poem that begins “The poetry of earth is never dead” and ends “on a lone winter evening,” when “to one in drowsiness half lost” the cricket “shrills” and wakens an echo of the grasshopper’s summer song “among some grassy hills.”

In 1817 Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote “Ozymandias,” perhaps the greatest of his short poems, when he and his banker friend Horace Smith sat down to compose dueling sonnets on a passage from the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus. The passage concerned Rameses II, the Egyptian pharaoh who squared off against Moses in Exodus. A massive statue glorifying him proclaimed on its pedestal that he was the “king of kings.” The poets used this phrase and called the ancient pharaoh, whose statue lay in ruins, Ozymandias.

Horace Smith’s “Ozymandias” has some fine lines about a hunter in a future age beholding “some fragment huge” in the wilderness “where London once stood.” But genius went into Shelley’s poem:

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 shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked 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.”

One reason “Ozymandias” is so often anthologized is that it conveys a message dear to poets. Time mocks emperors, particularly boastful ones. The sculptor’s “hand that mocked” is a brilliant pun, for the word “mocked” in 1817 signified not only ridicule but also imitation, as in painting from a model.

Fragments fascinate us, because they bear witness to the devastation of time.

Shakespeare’s sonnet #55 argues in favor of poetry, which shall outlive “the gilded monuments/ Of princes,” because marble and stone are inevitably “besmear’d with sluttish time,” while language, being immaterial, can theoretically live forever. In “Ozymandias,” Shelley, the brash idealist, argues against tyranny itself – “the frown, / And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command” – in the course of presenting the evidence that time defeats despots with their monumental vanity.

 An unusual rhyme scheme, with three rhymes occurring three times each, contributes to the power of “Ozymandias.” But the magnificence of the poem’s conclusion goes beyond rhetoric.  The disjunction between “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” and the curt sentence that follows, “Nothing beside remains,” is a breathtaking example of how a poet can use the line-break as a meaning-making mechanism.

The phrase “colossal wreck,” a near oxymoron, is as landlocked in the poem’s last three lines as the ruined statue in the endless desert. The alliteration – “boundless and bare, / The lone and level sands stretch far away” – smoothly conveys a sense of the vast continuous distance covered in that “stretch.”  The image is haunting, as is the framing device that Shelley employs. We are left wondering about the mysterious “traveler from an antique land” who is said to be the author of the poem.

“The New Colossus” (1883), Emma Lazarus’s stirring sonnet about the Statue of Liberty, borrows a rhyme from “Ozymandias” (stand, land, command) and invites us to read it as a rejoinder to Shelley’s sonnet. The statue in Lazarus' poem is a replacement for the Colossus of Rhodes, “the brazen giant of Greek fame.” The great bronze monument to the sun god, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, stood in the harbor of Rhodes. (It crumbled in an earthquake in 226 BC.) Not as a warrior with “conquering limbs” but as a woman with "mild eyes" and "silent lips," the new colossus will stand as tall as the old, honoring not a god but an ideal that will make it a wonder of the modern world. Welcoming immigrants and refugees, the legend in Lazarus' poem could be construed as the opposite of a tyrant's imperial vanity:

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she,
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore;
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.

-- David Lehman

from the archive; first published as a "masterpiece" column in The Wall Street Journal (June 23, 2017 1:04 pm ET).

Comments

[JC]

But don't you suspect Percy cheated a little bit? Had a few lines, maybe a sestet, stored in the monogramed valise of his mind, ready for just such an occasion? I know I always keep some poesy on the back burner when I'm hanging with my banker friends. You never know.

[JC]

Reminds me of a poem written by a long-ago friend of mine, Reed Clarke, a Canadian poet, about a room full of civil servants/poets participating in a poetry contest. The poem ends "No one looks up/TuFu will win." Funny what you remember.

[David Lehman]

I like "No one looks up / Tu Fu will win."

[David Lehman]

Dear JC, "the monogramed valise of his mind" is worth the price of admission. Shelley could write very rapidly and think in rhyme and meter and I do not believe he would have cheated. This was the eighth or ninth "masterpiece" column I did for the WSJ -- others were on Herbert, Marvell, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Yeats, Frost, Auden, and I'm leaving someone out. After this one came out, they sort of dropped me, though I don't think the provocative headline, "What Trumps Vain Boasts," did me in.
Thanks for commenting!

[Terence Winch]

Thanks for this wonderful reading of the poem. I was amazed and thrilled when it made a brief appearance in the Coen Bros. film, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, delivered brilliantly by Harry Melling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdQKUvv3bew.

[JC]

Terence, YES, and it was in another movie that I can't recall; a young woman recited it, maybe in an all-girls school. I can see and hear her doing it, but I can't place the damn movie.

[Slow Reader]

Thank you for this commentary!
Could you post your other "masterpiece" columns on this site, or if you already have, perhaps you could refer me to those webpages?

Now that US pandemic deaths have surpassed half a million, I have been trying to memorize "Shiloh" by Herman Melville (though my 60+ memory is not being cooperative), a poem which to me seems acutely timely ...
I would love to read your analysis of this poem if you would be so inclined to post it here.

[David Lehman]

Thanks for the vote of confidence, Slow Reader. My piece on a George Herbert poem will be posted on April 2nd. Melville's "Shiloh" is very fine, and I chose it for "The Oxford Book of American Poetry." Melville is altogether undervalued as a poet.

[David Lehman]

Slow Reader: check out this reading of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner":
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/03/on-the-rime-of-the-ancient-mariner-by-david-lehman.html

[Slow Reader]

Thanks so much for the link to your commentary on "Ancient Mariner" as well as including links to the your other commentaries and the "Great Poems" in left sidebar!
I will look forward to your thoughts on George Herbert, with "Redemption" being one of my very favorite poems.