ABSTRACT
In Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous sonnet ‘Ozymandias’ (1818) the narrator speaks of meeting a traveller who reports having seen a vast shattered statue strewn across the desert. The statue is of Ozymandias, the thirteenth-century bcKing Rameses II of Egypt (Ozymandias is the Greek name for this king). All that remains of the King of Kings and of his ‘works’ are a few broken fragments, a couple of legs and an inscription which commands the reader to despair. The poem, then, is about monuments, survival and the transience of even the greatest of us. But we might also notice that the poem is about readers and reading – the traveller reads a piece of writing, an inscription on the pedestal of
a fragmented statue. The inscription commands the reader. And, rather differently, the word ‘read’ appears in line six, referring to the way that the sculptor understood the ‘passions’ of Ozymandias and was able to immortalize them in stone. Both the traveller and the sculptor are explicitly figured as readers, and we might also think about the ‘I’ of the first line as another kind of reader – a listener to the traveller’s tale.
