‘Ozymandias’ by Percy Bysshe Shelley describes a story being told to the narrator about a statue of a previously great king now surrounded by nothing but sand. The poem reflects on the theme of impermanence and the idea that nothing, no matter how great it is at its peak, lasts forever.

‘Ozymandias’ doesn’t have much of a rhyme scheme, though there are a couple of slant rhymes, such as “appear” in line 9 and “despair” in line 11. However, the capitalization pattern throughout the poem varies and appears to be almost random. This is a literary technique that can be seen in other author’s works, such as Emily Dickenson. In this poem, the capitalized words, such as “Works” (line 11), “Mighty” (line 11), and “Wreck” (line 13) seem to be there to add an emphasis to the words and draw attention to their importance in the sentence and the story.

The story in this poem is a sort of second-hand report of what happened. The narrator is being told about the statue by someone who had recently seen it and is now describing it to others. The statue is of a former King, Ozymandias, who we can presume ruled over a great kingdom that he believed would survive forever. This feeling highlights the theme of impermanence that runs through the entire poem. Even the person telling the story is in a state of impermanence – the narrator introduces him as a “traveller from an antique land” (line 1). The statue the traveller describes no longer stands upright in its full glory – just the legs remain standing in the sand while the head of the statue lies half-buried a ways away from them. The only other remaining element of the statue is a plaque that talks about a great city that no longer exists, showing how not even the greatest of man’s creations can exist forever. 

The story starts and ends with a mention of sand and the desert. In lines 2 and 3, the poem reads “Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone / Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand” and line 14, the last line of the poem, reads “The lone and level sands stretch far away”. This repetition of sand surrounding the remains ties into the theme that everything will eventually return to nature. Even the greatest of cities will eventually be reclaimed by nature – it was here before us and it will be here long after us.

The tone of the poem is fairly neutral. The poet is retelling a story he’d previously been told, and there aren’t any emotional words in the poem, other than those used to describe the look on the statue of Ozymandias. However, there is a feeling of melancholy that can be seen throughout the poem as the speaker describes the ruins and what’s left of a once great city, leaving the reader to imagine what could have been.