What Is The Mood Of The Poem Ozymandias

“Ozymandias”, is a poem written by Percy Bysshe Shelley to tell its readers that wealth and materialistic pursuits are fleeting. The storyteller in the poem is a “traveller from an antique land”. This is a nameless traveler talking about the sights he is seeing. This produces a sense of mystery. Shelley is recounting something heard from another person. The statue is a manifestation of the artist who created it for Ozymandias. This poem celebrates the perpetual ability of nature and longstanding constructions of man while bringing attention to the fragility of humanity through a sonnet using iambic pentameter to set an intensely dark setting. Shelley brings attention to the perpetual ability of nature. One example of this is in line 12 which states “Nothing beside remains. Round the decay” – decay while not a pleasant word is nature. A second example is in line 14 and says “The lone and level sands stretch far away”. Sand is a part of nature and
This shows that it is not just the rich and powerful who desire immortality. It is ordinary for people to fight death. Additionally, in death, the sculptor ends up being more everlasting then Ozymandias. The devotion reserved for the king is now attributed to the artist in the poem. The only things that “survive” are the artist’s records of the king’s passion, carved into the stone. All of these words and details show the downfall of this king, whose face is destroyed and even his record of living ceases to hold any power in this world. This diction seen in this poem, raises the ideas of the theme, involving the god-like powers of nature that will bring down Ozymandias. Our best access to the king himself is not the statue, not anything physical, but the king’s own