The Ironies of Shelley's Ozymandias as a Monumental Poem

Ozymandias is a poem that has been widely read and analyzed as pertaining to the decay and destruction of leaders and the societies and empires that they build; an homage to the destructive and equalizing power of Time. The poem does not leave much room for further analysis beyond that, the language is clear and (when considering the object that inspired the poem) the meanings to be gleaned from the poem seem to be pretty limited in their vagaries. In this respect, I believe that it is difficult to give a reading of the poem that would present audiences with a new and surprising lens through which they could make meanings and take truth from the poem (save utilizing the radical and Borgesian interpretive techniques of Pierre Menard). Thus, I do not intend to give a specific reading of the poem (if that is acceptable in these blog posts, I'm not quite clear on that), but instead would like to consider the poem as a social artifact that has cut a wake through the history of Western culture and finally ended up anthologized in a book used for poetic and literary study.

I utilized the word "ironies" in the title of this post, and it is absolutely possible to find ironies within the text of Shelley's poem. The entire poem, in fact, somewhat revolves around an essential irony centered in the text of the inscription under Ozymandias's head (namely that the inscription assumes that there will be some "works" upon which we mighty might look and despair). However, I used "irony" in the plural to signify not only that there are ironies within the text, but also ironies that arise when considering the text in the context of Shelley’s own career.

The poem has become something of a monument to Shelley, and is somewhat of a poster child to his oeuvre. In this respect, the poem itself is similar to the monument of Ramses that inspired it in the first place. Indeed, the very existence of the poem maintains some of the fame that has stuck to Shelley, and has no doubt even rekindled something of the interest and awe found in the “works” that Ramses’s inscription refers to. Thus the poem sustains the very thing that it seems to suggest is destroyed with time, and even rekindles the fame of its subject who (previous to Shelley’s exposition) had fallen behind the times.