Ozymandias

"Ozymandias" is a sonnet written by the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. It was first published in the 11 January 1818 issue of The Examiner of London. The poem was included the following year in Shelley's collection Rosalind and Helen, A Modern Eclogue; with Other Poems, and in a posthumous compilation of his poems published in 1826.

The poem was created as part of a friendly competition in which Shelley and fellow poet Horace Smith each created a poem on the subject of Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II under the title of Ozymandias, the Greek name for the pharaoh. Shelley's poem explores the ravages of time and the oblivion to which the legacies of even the greatest men are subject.

Origin
Shelley began writing the poem "Ozymandias" in 1817, after the British Museum acquired the Younger Memnon, a head-and-torso fragment of a statue of Ramesses II removed by Italian archeologist Giovanni Battista Belzoni from the Ramesseum, the mortuary temple of Ramesses II at Thebes. Although the Younger Memnon did not arrive in London until 1821 and  Shelley likely never saw the statue, the reputation of the statue fragment had preceded its arrival to Western Europe. Retrieval of the 7.25 ST fragment had been a goal at least as far back as a failed 1798 attempt by Napoleon Bonaparte.

Shelley, who had had explored similar themes in his 1813 work Queen Mab, was also influenced by Constantin François de Chassebœuf's book Les Ruines, ou méditations sur les révolutions des empires (The Ruins, or a Survey of the Revolutions of Empires), first published in an English translation in 1792.

Publication history
The banker and political writer Horace Smith spent the Christmas season of 1817–1818 with Percy and Mary Shelley. At this time, members of their literary circle would sometimes challenge each other to write competing sonnets on a common subject: Shelley, John Keats and Leigh Hunt wrote competing sonnets about the Nile around the same time. Shelley and Smith both chose a passage from the writings of the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus in Bibliotheca historica, which described a massive Egyptian statue and quoted its inscription: "King of Kings Ozymandias am I. If any want to know how great I am and where I lie, let him outdo me in my work." In Shelley's poem, Diodorus becomes "a traveller from an antique land."

Shelley wrote the poem around Christmas in 1817 —either in December that year or early January 1818. The poem was printed in The Examiner, a weekly paper published by Leigh's brother John Hunt in London. Hunt admired Shelley's poetry and many of his other works, such as The Revolt of Islam, were published in The Examiner. Shelley's poem was published on 11 January 1818 under the pen name "Glirastes". The name meant "lover of dormice", dormouse being his pet name for his spouse, author Mary Shelley. Smith's sonnet of the same name was published several weeks later. Shelley's poem appeared on page 24 in the yearly collection, under Original Poetry. It appeared again in Shelley's 1819 collection Rosalind and Helen, A Modern Eclogue; with Other Poems, which was republished in 1876 under the title "Sonnet. Ozymandias" by Charles and James Ollier and in the 1826 Miscellaneous and Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley by William Benbow, both in London.

Analysis and interpretation
Shelley's "Ozymandias" is a sonnet, written in loose iambic pentameter, but with an atypical rhyme scheme, which violates the Italian sonnet rule that there should be no connection in rhyme between the octave and the sestet.

Two themes of the "Ozymandias" poems are the inevitable decline of rulers and their hubris. In the poem, despite Ozymandias' grandiose ambitions, the power turned out to be ephemeral.

The rhyme scheme reflects the interlocking stories of the poem's four narrative voices, which are its "I", the "traveller" (an exemplar of the sort of travel literature author whose works Shelley would have encountered), the statue's "architect", and the statue's subject himself. The "I met a traveller [who...]" framing of the poem is an instance of the "once upon a time" storytelling device.

Reception and impact
The poem has been cited as Shelley's best-known and is generally considered one of his best works, though it is sometimes considered uncharacteristic of his poetry. An article in Alif cited "Ozymandias" as "one of the greatest and most famous poems in the English language". Stephens considered that the Ozymandias Shelley created dramatically altered the opinion of Europeans on the king. Donald P. Ryan wrote that "Ozymandias" "stands above" numerous other poems written about ancient Egypt, particularly its fall and described the sonnet as "a short, insightful commentary on the fall of power".

"Ozymandias" has been included in many poetry anthologies, particularly school textbooks, such as AQA's GCSE English Literature Power and Conflict Anthology, where it is often included because of its perceived simplicity and the relative ease with which it can be memorized. Several poets, including Richard Watson Gilder and John B. Rosenma, have written poems titled "Ozymandias" in response to Shelley's work.

The influence of the poem can be found in other works, including Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. It has been translated into Russian, where Shelley was an influential figure.

In the AMC drama Breaking Bad, the 14th episode of season 5 is titled "Ozymandias." The episode's title alludes to the collapse of protagonist Walter White's drug empire. Bryan Cranston, who portrayed White, read the poem in its entirety in a teaser for final episodes of the series. The media company Ozy was named after the poem, as is the character Ozymandias in the comic book series Watchmen.

Woody Allen used the term "Ozymandias melancholia" in his movies Stardust Memories and To Rome with Love.

The poem is quoted by the A.I. character David in Alien: Covenant predicting the decline and demise of the human empire and referenced in the penultimate episode of Succession. The work is also referenced in Joanna Newsom's song "Sapokanikan".

The poem is quoted by both main characters, Red and Blue, in the Hugo Award-winning novella This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal el-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. The scene of the "vast and trunkless legs of stone" also appears in the work.