I met a traveller from an antique land...

Ozymandias

Percy Bysshe Shelley

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". 

In the spirit of Breaking Bad’s series finale, and all of its splendid closure, I’m going to take a look at “Ozymandias” a poem, coincidentally, by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Notice how I did not say “ironically”. The poem opens with “I met a traveller from an antique land” (1). The speaker of the poem is retelling the words from a traveller who is retelling his tale to the speaker. Up front, there are echoes of frame narrative at play, which is also coincidental, seeing how Percy‘s wife, Mary, told her narrative through frame narrative. The traveler describes seeing “two vast and trunkless legs of stone / stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, / Half sunk, a shattered visage lies” (3-4). This great figure that the statue was built in representation no longer stands. Instead, its feet lay planted into the ground, but the torso has collapsed under its own weight. This can be representative of the stubbornness of Ozymandias. While he held a steady ground for his empire, he couldn’t handle himself, and succumbed to the inevitable gravity his pride challenged. His feet stand, planted in what he believed was his, and yet the traveller looks around to find that Ozymandias has only claimed sand and dirt. Sand is a symbol that shows up whenever something is fleeting. Sand rarely belongs to a set territory and is roughly considered a solid mass. The million grains of sand that give it its mass, and still it is without definite form, characterize the ambiguous side of nature. The sand can then be representative of Ozymandias’ empire. The sand represents the thousands of souls that perished at the cost of Ozymandias’ power. And even after their departure from earth, they are lost souls, without a home and forced to roam the vast desert. Ozymandias’ broken face shows how delicate and weak his rough intimidating exterior was. He was only a human. The pedestal the traveler describes is Ozymandias’ declaration, “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look on my works, ye Might, and despair!”(10-11). This is immediately juxtaposed with the empty wasteland this crumbled statue occupies. This shows how empty Ozymandias threats were. Despite the threat that his pride displayed, it was no more than just that - a threat. Even if he possessed power during his occupation, his mere mortality meant nothing compared to the vastness of time.  That leads me to observing a certain “broken hourglass image”. Sand measures a set amount of time in an hour glass. Usually the end of this time is death, but the absence of an hour glass, and the ever bearing presence of the sea of sand puts time in a new perspective. By setting the poem in the desert, Shelley emphasizes how Ozymandias is lost in an ocean of time. A man, who possessed true power, is now nothing more than a cautionary tale, observed only rarely by a wanderer without a home. This is Percy’s way of warning humans of their ego. Power destroyed Ozymandias.