Modern Ozymandias

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s sonnet Ozymandias, though an influential romantic poem draws many parallels to modernist works such as The Sound and the Fury and A Clean Well Lighted Place. Ozymandias presents a disfigured statue with a “shattered visage,” “half sunk” in the middle of a desert wasteland. This statue’s role in Ozymandias is as Faulkner writes in The Sound and the Fury: “the mausoleum of all hope and desire.” It was Ozymandias’ hope to erect this statue to model his greatness as a ruler yet it wound up functioning as his mausoleum of shame. The sonnet is of all that was “colossal” but now a hopeless land of “wreck, boundless and bare.” Perhaps this is because the year this poem was written, 1816, was a very discouraging year for Shelley being that he lost his children due to scandals surrounding his personal life. The helplessness of the image of a head sunken in desert sands resonates with another of Faulkner’s lines in The Sound and the Fury: “The battlefield only reveals to a man his own folly and despair, victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.” Shelley has not only destroyed an image of greatness and power but he has robbed it of the dignity of destruction- the reader sees nothing but the irony of the “King of Kings.” Moreover we are told this story from the traveler, which adds a degree of separation from the reader and the actual story, further trivializing the grandeur of the king. This sonnet is aimless, it has nothing to accomplish, for judging by the last line its not just that people are deemed insignificant by the passage of time or that all things great must pass, but that we are left with a complete emptiness. In this way I was reminded of Hemingway’s Clean Well Lighted Place: “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada.” All that should be regarded with respect, religion and kings, have been exhausted. And thus what has been born is “the lone and level sands stretched far away.” The dry desert sands are alone and they are completely level no turbulence, no excitement, just nothingness that stretches on and on with no end in sight.