In the poem "Ozymandias," Percy Shelley paints a picture of the desolation and ruin of a once-powerful empire. Shelley uses a narrative shift to make the point that power and might are not immortal. He doesn't give us fantastical descriptions of what the kingdom was once like. The traveler in the poem gives us the bare facts of what it is now:
Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
This description makes the final lines of the poem, spoken by the long-dead Ozymandias, more effective because of the irony:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
All that remains are remnants of his "mighty works"—a broken statue, the traveler says:
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
Shelley's image of the abandoned and ruined statue suggests that while empires come and go, only art lasts forever.
