Ozymandias

by: Percy Shelley

Objectives

Students will read Ozymandias.

Students will reflect on the poem as they read it.

Students will attain a basic, thematic understanding of Ozymandias.

Students will venture a reading of the poem that produces some meaning relevant to the current day.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert.

What are “trunkless legs?”

What do you think “antique land” means?

How do “antique” and “age/time” relate?

Why do you think the legs are trunkless?

Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

What is lying on the ground?

What does “sneer of cold command” indicate?

What did the sculptor do or read well?  How did it affect the look of the sculpture?

What still survives?  How so?

What do hands that mock and a heart that feeds indicate about Ozymandias?

Who do you think is “them?”  How did Ozymandias treat them?

And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

What does Ozymandias think of himself?

What does it mean for others to despair?

What remains of Ozymandias the stature?  The man?

Why is that all that remains?

What is mightier than Ozymandias?