How do I analyse Ozymandias for GCSE?

What is Ozymandias about?

The speaker meets "a traveller from an antique land", someone back from an ancient country, and almost the whole poem is the traveller's story. In the desert stand "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone": two huge legs with no body on top. Nearby, half sunk in the sand, lies the statue's broken face. Its expression survives, a frown and a "sneer of cold command", the look of a ruler used to giving orders.

The traveller says the sculptor understood the king's feelings well. He carved them so skilfully that they still show in the stone, long after both men died. On the pedestal, the stone block the statue stood on, the king's boast is carved: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings". It goes on to order other powerful rulers to look at what he built and despair. Then comes the twist. Around the statue there is nothing at all, only flat, empty sand stretching as far as anyone can see.

What is the context of Ozymandias?

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 to 1822) was a Romantic poet. The Romantics were writers of the late 1700s and early 1800s who put nature and strong feeling at the centre of their work. Shelley was also a political radical, someone who wanted deep change in how the country was run. Oxford University expelled him in 1811 after he co-wrote a pamphlet called The Necessity of Atheism, and he spent his short life writing against kings and tyrants.

He wrote Ozymandias around Christmas 1817, in a friendly contest with the poet Horace Smith, in which both men wrote a sonnet on the same subject. Shelley's was published in The Examiner, a London weekly paper, on 11 January 1818. Ozymandias was the Greek name for Ramesses II, one of the most powerful pharaohs of ancient Egypt, who ruled more than 3,000 years ago. Shelley drew on the ancient Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, who described a giant statue of the pharaoh carved with a boastful inscription.

Timing matters too. The poem appeared less than three years after Napoleon, the emperor who had conquered much of Europe, was defeated at Waterloo in 1815. Shelley also despised the British monarchy of his own day: in 1819 he wrote a sonnet called "England in 1819" attacking King George III. So when you write about context (AO3), link the poem to Shelley's belief that tyrants fall, not just to ancient Egypt.

How does Shelley present power in Ozymandias?

Shelley builds the king up and knocks him down in the same line. "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone" starts with size: "vast" suggests an enormous ego as well as an enormous statue. Then "trunkless" takes the body away. A monument built to show strength now shows only what has been lost.

The face gets close attention. The alliteration (repeated sounds at the start of nearby words) in "cold command" gives a hard "c" sound, which makes his rule sound harsh. The word "sneer" suggests contempt for the people beneath him. This is irony, a gap between what was intended and what actually happened: the king wanted to be remembered for his greatness, but the stone remembers his cruelty.

The sculptor comes out of the poem better than the king. His hand "mocked" the king's passions, and the verb works two ways. In Shelley's day "mock" could mean to copy, so the sculptor copied the king's face. It also means to make fun of, which hints that the artist saw straight through him. The artist's skill has lasted; the ruler's power has not.

The inscription is the heart of the poem. The title "king of kings" claims power over every other ruler, and "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" is an imperative, a command, aimed at those rulers. Ozymandias meant: despair, because you will never match me. The empty desert turns the line against him. Now the mighty should despair because their own works will crumble too.

Then the tone drops. "Nothing beside remains" is flat and short after the king's exclamation. The last line, "The lone and level sands stretch far away", repeats the "l" sound and uses long vowels that slow the reading down, so the desert seems to go on for ever. Nature and time have the final word, and they need no inscription.

What do the form and structure of Ozymandias add?

Ozymandias is a sonnet, a poem of 14 lines. Sonnets were traditionally love poems, so using one to bury a tyrant is a pointed choice. The lines are mostly in iambic pentameter: ten syllables per line, in a da-DUM rhythm repeated five times. The steady beat gives the poem a calm, storytelling voice, as if the fall of a king is simply what happens.

The rhyme scheme is unusual. Ozymandias does not follow either of the best-known sonnet patterns, the Italian or the Shakespearean. It rhymes ABABACDCEDEFEF, and some rhymes are only half-rhymes, such as "stone" and "frown". Many readers see the broken pattern as a match for the broken statue: the form, like the king's power, has not quite held together.

Look at who is speaking. Only the first line belongs to the poem's speaker. The rest is the traveller's report, which includes the king's words carved in stone. This frame, a story inside a story, keeps the king at a distance. His voice reaches us only through other people, which makes him seem smaller than he ever wanted to be.

Sonnets often have a volta, a turn where the poem changes direction. Here the sharpest turn comes at the start of line 12. "Nothing beside remains." is followed by a caesura, a pause in the middle of a line, here a full stop. The pause lands like the end of the king's power. After it comes enjambment, where a sentence runs on over the end of a line: "Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck" spills into the next line, and the sands spread out as the sentence does.

Which poems does Ozymandias compare well with?

Pick a partner poem that lets you say something different, not just something similar. These three work well.

What could an exam question on Ozymandias ask?

On AQA, Paper 2 Section B prints one named poem from the Power and Conflict cluster. You compare it with one other poem from the cluster, which you choose and quote from memory. The question is worth 30 marks and is assessed on AO1, AO2 and AO3, the assessment objectives. There are no marks for spelling, punctuation and grammar in this section.

Two focuses to practise, written for this guide:

Focus 1: Compare how poets present the power of rulers in Ozymandias and in one other poem from Power and Conflict.

Focus 2: Compare how poets present the power of nature in Ozymandias and in one other poem from Power and Conflict.

Here is an original model opening for the first focus, comparing Ozymandias with My Last Duchess:

Both Shelley and Browning present rulers who try to control how they are remembered, but only one of them succeeds. Ozymandias commands other rulers to "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!", yet the imperative sounds hollow once "Nothing beside remains." Browning's Duke has more success, because he still controls his dead wife's image: her portrait is hidden behind a curtain that only he may draw. Shelley, a radical who opposed kings, lets time destroy his tyrant, while Browning leaves his tyrant chillingly in charge.

Notice that the comparison starts in the first sentence, and the last sentence links each poem's ending to its writer's purpose.

Key quotations from Ozymandias to learn

These six are short enough to learn and rich enough to analyse.

• "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone": "vast" shows the size of his ambition, and "trunkless" shows how little of it is left.
• "sneer of cold command": the hard "c" sounds make his rule sound harsh, and the sneer is what the stone remembers.
• "The hand that mocked them": the sculptor copied the king's passions and, in the other sense of "mocked", saw through them.
• "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!": an imperative that the empty desert turns against the king who ordered it.
• "Nothing beside remains.": three flat words and a full stop answer the king's boast.
• "The lone and level sands stretch far away.": the repeated "l" sounds and long vowels make the desert feel endless, so nature has the last word.