Ozymandias
A traveller from an antique land reports two vast and trunkless legs of stone standing in a desert, with a shattered face half sunk in the sand nearby, its frown and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command still legible after both the sculptor and the subject are gone. On the pedestal a name and a boast survive intact. Shelley wrote it against a deadline in a sonnet competition with Horace Smith over the winter of 1817, working from Diodorus Siculus's account of a colossus at the Ramesseum.
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Attributes
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
Plot structure
Symbol / motif
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
- 54% · 8 shared
- 48% · 7 shared
- 48% · 7 shared
- 48% · 7 shared
- 44% · 7 shared
- 44% · 6 shared