‘Ozymandias’: The Riddle of the Sands

For some reason 'Ozymandias' has received scant critical attention. It is generally acknowledged to be one of Shelley's finest poems, and has been repeatedly anthologized, yet book after book on Shelley either fails to mention it at all, or, conceding its fame, declines to say much about it. Desmond King-Hele puts his finger on one reason for this neglect in observing that "No one who was asked to select a typical poem of Shelley's would choose Ozymandias: intuitively one feels the poem is completely untypical".1 In the second part of this paper, I will argue that this is not altogether true, yet clearly there's something about the poem that makes it resist interpretation in the same terms as Shelley's other celebrated works. In seeking to understand the poem, it seems a good idea to start by going to the text in the first place, rather than to its various contexts. Accordingly the first part of this paper offers a close reading of the poem. The second develops from the first, to explore overall approaches to the poem, and, in particular, to question the claims of political readings of the poem as a castigation of tyranny. It does so largely in the context of Shelley's other writing. However, while it draws upon insights from the earlier part of the paper, it occasionally reverses or qualifies them. I considered revising the paper so that it offered a single, consistent view of the poem, but on reflection decided to leave these changes of interpretation as they stand, as being more faithful testimony to the shifting sands on which one reads Shelley. The manner in which one's view of the poem can develop, and even invert itself, is among its most striking characteristics.