A Poem as an Old Friend

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.

I was working on sonnets with my class today and happened upon this old friend, so I thought I'd share some thoughts and reflections. I have loved this poem, ever since I first encountered it in some high school English class or another, mostly for the richly layered and often conflicting emotions I feel each time I read it. It is stark and lonely yet warm and dusty - it echoes and is muted all at the same time. It speaks volumes to me about human arrogance and pettiness, and volumes more about our place in the universe.
It was written by Percy Bysshe Shelley and first published in 1818, and is probably Shelley's most famous short poem, though surprisingly critics regard it as on of Shelley's lesser works. In addition to the power of its themes and images, the poem is remarkable for its marvelous rhythm and unusual (for a sonnet) rhyme scheme (ABABACDCEDEFEF) which, along with the imagery, creates a sinuous and interwoven effect .
The name Ozymandias is generally believed to refer to Ramesses the Great (i.e., Ramesses II), Pharaoh of ancient Egypt. Ozymandias represents a transliteration into Greek of a part of Ramesses's throne name. The sonnet paraphrases the inscription on the base of the statue, given by Diodorus Siculus as "King of Kings am I, Osymandias. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works." Shelley's poem was inspired by the arrival in London of a colossal statue of Ramesses II, acquired for the British Museum by the Italian adventurer Giovanni Belzoni in 1816.
In line 7, the word "survive" is a transitive verb, with "hand" and "heart" as its direct objects. Thus, the lines mean that those passions (arrogance and sneer) have survived (outlived) both the sculptor (whose hand mocked those passions by stamping them so well on the statue) and the pharaoh (whose heart fed those passions in the first place).
The verb "mock'd" originally meant "to create/fashion an imitation of reality" (as in "a mockup") before meaning "to ridicule" (especially by mimicking). In Shelley's day, the latter meaning was predominant (as seen in the works of William Shakespeare or the King James Version of the Bible), but in the specific context of "the hand that mock'd them", we can read both "the hand that crafted them" and "the hand that ridiculed them". Indeed throughout the poem, Shelley celebrates the anonymous artist and his achievement. The lone and level sands stretching far away suggest the desolation that results from the impulse to impose oneself on the landscape. When Shelley says "nothing beside remains," he suggests the nothingness of space around the ruins and of the ruins themselves, and he puns on the ruins as "remains." That there is nothing beside the ruins implies that it touches, or connects to, nothing.
This poem is often incorrectly quoted or reproduced. The most common misquotation — "Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!" — replaces the correct "on" with "upon", thus turning the regular decasyllabic (iambic pentameter) verse into an 11-syllable verse, and we can't have that now can we!?