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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.”

 

 

“Ozymandias” (the poem) has had a surprising afterlife, almost as surprising as that of its titular monarch, aka Ramses II, the Pharaoh who purportedly butted heads with Moses and lost. Far from passing into oblivion like Ramses’ crumbling monument, however, the poem seems well on its way to achieving that eternal life for which, back in the day, only Pharaohs were presumably destined. It’s among the best known, if not the best known, of Percy Shelley’s verses, making regular appearances in schoolroom anthologies and comic books alike. Woody Allen refers to it in his movies, the antihero of the popular Watchman series calls himself “Ozymandias,” and Bryan Cranston recited the entire sonnet, in voiceover, prefatory to an episode of Breaking Bad. More recently, Shiv Roy, daughter of media mogul Logan Roy, referenced it in the penultimate episode of Succession on first beholding her father’s mausoleum.

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Depressed by the daily outrages of our recently elected Ozymandias, I find solace in Shelley’s vision of the fate history has prepared for its tyrants. Some of us may even live long enough to witness it. I doubt I will.

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Aside from teaching us a thing or two about the fickleness of fame, “Ozymandias” also has a lesson for artists, including poets like the one who wrote it. In fact, I’ve often wondered if the most salient irony Shelley wanted to convey by his sonnet is not how time inevitably upends the pretensions of despots, but how artists, even unknown artists, contribute to that overthrow simply by bearing witness to the truth of the time in which they live, the truth as they see it.

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It's easy to overlook the importance of the sculptor mentioned in line 6, who “read” the “passions” animating the man-god’s “frown,/ And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command” well enough to expose them, unglossed by commentary, to the critical gaze of history. Shelley’s obscure stone mason appears only by metonym, in “the hand” that carved these gargantuan features (1) and, arguably, “the heart” that “fed” the “passions” he depicted in them by creating specimens of obsequious flattery like this one. Shelley may have been thinking of Ammit, the Egyptian deity who eats the hearts of the dead that Annubis judges to be unworthy of an afterlife, thereby destroying their souls. This “colossal wreck” is all the afterlife its unknown creator will ever have, now that Ramses has devoured his soul.

 

Which is to say, “Ozymandias” is not a poem about speaking truth to power.

 

Shelley was only twenty-five when he wrote “Ozymandias” and already one of England’s most notorious radicals. He learned the necessity of standing up to bullies at Eton and carried the lesson with him to Oxford, where his pamphlet, “The Necessity of Atheism,” got him expelled in his first year.  But he also understood the limitations imposed on others not fortunate enough to have been born the son of a baronet. Having read nearly everything there was to read in the fields of literature, philosophy, history, and the natural sciences, ancient and modern, he would have guessed that the Pharaoh’s anonymous stone mason occupied a rank in Egyptian society barely higher than that of a household slave. Architects are mentioned in the annals of Egypt, and an occasional scribe, along with court officials, high priests, distinguished generals, and wealthy heads of households. There is not a single painter, sculptor, jeweler, or, for that matter, poet or musician to be found among them.

 

We may wish Shelley’s sculptor had been less assiduous in carrying out his remit—drawn a mustache, so to speak, on that terrifying “visage.” Had he done so, however, history would have missed its chance, and the irony of the inscription on the pedestal standing near the Pharoah’s half-sunk head would have lost much of its bite. The “lone and level sands” stretching far away in every direction are what the “works” of Ozymandias have become, and what this monument is fast becoming.

 

Despair, indeed, ye Mighty!

 

The word “mock” drives this point home like the tip of a chisel. Shelley’s derogatory intentions lead us to read the word as derisive, and it is. Nonetheless, we can be sure that neither the sculptor nor his subject ever got the joke. How could it be otherwise? The sculptor knew better than to satirize his master and Ramses would have had him beheaded had he even tried. Like every other inhabitant of the Nile Valley, he probably worshipped Pharaoh as the deity incarnate he claimed to be.

 

But “mock,” even today, retains its other, less derogatory meaning, which is, simply, to mimic, copy, or imitate. (2) We can more readily recognize this innocuous meaning in words like “mockingbird,” or compounds like “mock-up” to mean “model,” or in phrases like “mock turtle soup.” In Shelley’s poem, both meanings are in play: the artist has done his best to be faithful to his subject, but history has different ideas.

 

Flattery is a tricky thing. Even a hint of exaggeration can push it in the direction of parody. I’m put in mind of the finale of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, written in 1937 at the height of Stalin’s bloody purges. Shostakovich’s music had been denounced by the Communist Party as decadent and the composer reportedly feared for his life. The Fifth’s grandiose finale has appeared to many as a sop to the regime in the chest-thumping style most favored by its fearless leader. Others, meanwhile, have taken it to be a sonorous, nose-thumbing raspberry directed at the Party apparatchiks.

 

Many years later, Shostakovich himself said of the finale, “I think it is clear to everyone what happens in the Fifth. The rejoicing is forced, created under threat. It’s as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, ‘Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing.’” (3) His “everyone” clearly did not include Stalin, or the audience listening to the symphony’s premiere, which gave it a standing ovation that lasted a full hour.

 

Or did they, too, fear for their lives?

 

When I began this “View,” I made a point of including poets among the artists that Shelley’s sculptor is meant to represent. And it’s no stretch of the imagination to do so. After all, the man who carved the statue is the one who, presumably, chiseled the tyrant’s words on its pedestal, an act of ventriloquism or impersonation, if you will, common to poets who adopt the persona of someone else. Think of the Duke of Ferrara in Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” or Crazy Jane in Yeats’s “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop.” The two lines of the Pharaoh’s speech are even written in iambic pentameter. And without these words, which outlasted, legibly and intact, Ramses and his sculptor and the nearly complete ruination of his monument, the whole point of Shelley’s sonnet would be lost.

 

But let’s not stop there. From the second line of the sonnet to the end, the poet is transcribing, in verse form, the report of a “traveler from an antique land” bearing witness to what time has made of Ramses’ statue. That traveler did have a name. He was Diodorus Siculus, the Greek historian whose account of seeing the statue inspired Shelley to write “Ozymandias” in the first place. (“Ozymandias” is the Greek name for Ramses II.) Although the statue Diodorus saw was still intact, Shelley applied its inscription, revised, to a different statue of Ramses in a more desperate state of disrepair. That one and its twin were reassembled in 196 CE and appear today as in the photograph above.

 

Sculptors, poets, travel writers—once we open the door, all the arts rush in. What do the greatest of their practitioners have in common?

 

We live in an age enamored of the idea that the prime duty of the arts is to speak truth to power, to challenge the orthodoxies of the day, to “make a difference” or “make an impact” that will strike a blow for justice or freedom or fairness. And there’s a place in the palace of art for all that.

 

But I believe the greatest artists do not share a vision as narrow as this. Consider that some of the most admired paintings in the history of art took monarchs and prelates and the landowning classes as their subjects, often portraying them in the most flattering terms. Holbein’s portraits of Henry VIII and Sir Thomas More, along with the best-known works of Gainsborough and Velasquez, come immediately to mind. Religious paintings and sculptures dominate the Western tradition and have become objects of veneration by lovers of art from every walk of life and of every religious persuasion, despite the ignorance and oppression and persecution they were intended to aid and abet.

 

If you could only rescue one of Van Gogh's paintings from a burning house, which would you choose: "Starry Night” or the much more “impactful” “Potato Eaters”?

 

The lesson of “Ozymandias” is that an artist’s only duty is to speak the truth as they see it. If that includes, for any artist, an address to power, fine. Even better if power pays attention.

 

In any case, time will have the last word. Better be ready.

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Notes:

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1. The syntax of lines 7 and 8 can lead to confusion. “Survives” is used transitively here, not intransitively. It takes a direct object—actually, two of them: " that mocked [“those passions”], and that fed [them].” The participial phrase, “stamped on these lifeless things,” detaches the verb “survives” from “hand” and “heart,” giving unwary readers the impression that it has no direct object and leaving the entirety of line 8 dangling senselessly. Shorn of its participial phrase, the two lines would read as follows: “Which yet survive [. . .] the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed [them].”

2. See Merriam-Webster, “mock: verb” (), definition 4a; “mock: noun”, definitions 4a and b; “mock:adjective;” and “mock:adverb.”

3. Quoted in the newsletter of the San Francisco Symphony (https://www.keepingscore.org/interactive/shostakovich-fifth-symphony).