“Ozymandias”: A Poem in Motion – Part 2

As the poem moves in voice, it also moves through time. It opens in the narrator's present but quickly moves back into an undefined past as the narrator describes how he “met” the traveller who “said,” two past tense verbs (lines 1-2). We are now in the traveller's present as he speaks of the “[t]wo vast and trunkless legs of stone” that still “[s]tand in the desert” beside the place where “a shattered visage lies” with its “frown” and “wrinkled lip” and “sneer of cold command” (lines 2-5; note the present tense). These still survive, at least in the traveller's time.

We are then invited to travel further back through the ages as the traveller speculates on the sculptor who “those passions read” on Ozymandias' living face (line 6). We can picture the king posing, curving his lip into an expression of disdain as the sculptor etches his emotion into stone. Then we move forward once again, to the traveller's present as he reflects on the irony that such passions are now only “stamped on these lifeless things” (line 7). As the traveller shifts his attention to the words on the pedestal, we are once again transported back into the past to hear the voice of the king, who speaks his haughty words so the sculptor may capture them in stone for all time (lines 10-11). As the last word rings out – “...despair!” – we find ourselves once again in the traveller's present, and we stay there. “Nothing beside remains,” the traveller tells us, only a “colossal Wreck” and “lone and levels sands” (lines 12-14). Time has conquered Ozymandias, but in a way, we are also caught by it, for the poem does not return us to the present. We remain in that desert of the past, staring at the broken statue and wondering perhaps if time has conquered us as well.

The poem is almost cinematic in the way it moves through time, but it even more so in the way it moves through space. Again, the poem commences in the space of the narrator, about which we know nothing at all. We might imagine the place where he met the traveller, on board a ship, perhaps, in a busy railroad station, at a museum, but he does not tell us. The space is left blank. The traveller's immediate space is also empty, for the moment he begins to speak the “camera” shifts to a desert scene. It is a medium shot of the “[t]wo vast and trunkless legs of stone” with the arid wasteland forming a background (line 2). Then the focus moves downward to the “shattered visage” on the ground, “[h]alf sunk” in the sand (line 4).

The camera then zooms in on the expression and remains there as the traveller muses on the passions of a king and the sculptor who captured them; this is a close-up shot that mirrors the sculptor's own work of preserving a personality. Our attention then travels upward from the face to the pedestal and focuses in on its words. We can imagine a camera passing slowly over each word that we might ponder each letter, each chisel mark, so carefully inscribed in the stone. Then, suddenly, as we pass the exclamation point, the camera zooms back out to a wide shot. We see the entire “Wreck,” and “[n]othing beside remains...” only the “boundless and bare” desert, the “lone and level sands” that “stretch far away” (lines 12-14). We are left gazing across a vast space, all sand but for a pile of crumbled stone that was once a marvelous statue of a great king.

In the end, each of the three motions of “Ozymandias” fails to make a full circle. We never return to the voice of the narrator; he remains silent. We stay in the past, never coming back to the narrator's present or our own present. We continue to stare at the expanse of desert, never again thinking of the blank space in which the poem begins. The poem has drawn us out of ourselves, away from any familiar voice, away from our own time, away from any well-known space, yet in this quiet past, this vast waste, we are no longer focused on Ozymandias either. He is no longer the center of our attention. Like the traveller, we have journeyed far in this poem, moving through voice, time, and space, and we are left to reflect on voices that have faded yet still echo in our minds, on a past that is gone yet still remains within us, and on a space that points us into a distance where our imaginations can fly free.