![]() That principle may well remain valid, but it is undercut by the plain fact that even an empire is a human creation that will one day pass away. The original inscription read “I am Ozymandias, King of Kings if anyone wishes to know what I am and where I lie, let him surpass me in some of my exploits.” The idea was that he was too powerful for even the common king to relate to him even a mighty king should despair at matching his power. The final five lines mock the inscription hammered into the pedestal of the statue. The “heart” is first of all the king’s, which “fed” the sculptor’s passions, and in turn the sculptor’s, sympathetically recapturing the king’s passions in the stone. Egyptian King Ramses II, whom the Greeks called “Ozymandias.” The traveler describes the great work of the sculptor, who was able to capture the king’s “passions” and give meaningful expression to the stone, an otherwise “lifeless thing.” The “mocking hand” in line 8 is that of the sculptor, who had the artistic ability to “mock” (that is, both imitate and deride) the passions of the king. The title of the poem informs the reader that the subject is the 13th-century B.C. Here we have a speaker learning from a traveler about a giant, ruined statue that lay broken and eroded in the desert. Although it is neither a Petrarchan sonnet nor a Shakespearean sonnet, the rhyming scheme and style resemble a Petrarchan sonnet more, particularly with its 8-6 structure rather than 4-4-4-2. "Ozymandias" is a fourteen-line, iambic pentameter sonnet. There also was a pedestal at the statue, where the traveler read that the statue was of “Ozymandias, King of Kings.” Although the pedestal told “mighty” onlookers that they should look out at the King’s works and thus despair at his greatness, the whole area was just covered with flat sand. The sculptor interpreted his subject well. The face was sunk in the sand, frowning and sneering. The first-person poetic persona states that he met a traveler who had been to “an antique land.” The traveler told him that he had seen a vast but ruined statue, where only the legs remained standing.
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