The Power of Art in Shelley’s “Ozymandias”

photo by Loozrboy@flickr

P. B Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” that old chestnut that most of us have studied in high school, survives even the institutional attempts to deprive the poem of its power.  Our high school teachers, reluctant to get us to understand the subversive message of the poem, probably dwelt mostly on the more obvious message of the dangers of self-aggrandizement or presumption by mere mortals, especially those in high places. This point is easily recognized through the unintentionally ironic inscription at the base of the ruined statue of the emperor Ozymandias (Egyptian King Ramses II):

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,

Look on my Works ye Mighty and Despair!

Given the wrecked state of the statue, the king's original bid for power and glory becomes an unintentional warning to other kings against trying to do the same.

It’s no accident that Frankenstein, the novel written by Shelley's wife, Mary, in the same year (1818) carries a similar moral message concerning the vanity of human presumption.  Back of both literary works were the real-world arrogance of the defeated Napoleon, as well as the arrogance of those who defeated him--Prince Metternich and the members of the Quadruple Alliance (to which the U.K. belonged), who began to re-establish monarchy in Europe and attempt a reversal of the effects of the French Revolution. Obviously, Shelley’s poem can be seen as saying (to quote Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet) “a plague on both your houses.” 

Yet, taken in the context of contemporary ideas about the sublime, the poem carries a deeper and more far-reaching message. The poem’s sublime effect is created by the image of “the decay/ Of that colossal Wreck” of Ozymandias’ statue that is standing alone in the desert, while “ boundless and bare/ The lone and level sands stretch far away” (ll. 13-14). The effect here, as articulated by Edmund Burke’s theory of the sublime, mainly involves the issue of power. As Burke says in his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime andthe Beautiful (1757),  “I know of nothing sublime, which is not some modification of power,” and anything that is sublime must have the power to so overwhelm the reader/spectator that he or she is deprived of all ability to think or act.

Engaging our survival instincts, the sublime creates in us the feeling of pain, astonishment, awe, or terror. Burke, of course, is not talking about real-world experience of such a threat, but an aesthetic effect.  Although the powers that the sublime invoke are derived from real-world experience, it is the artistic representation of that experience that counts. In other words, the original power that the sublime invokes is derived from nature or the real world (such as earthquakes, high precipices, wild animals, shipwrecks) but is really being wielded by the artist-writer who represents that power in the art object (painting or poem).

“Ozymandias,” then, can be seen as a poem that is really about the power of the artist, or at least the power of the artist in a triangular relationship with the power of the arrogant monarch Ozymandias and the power of time/nature that defeats the monarch’s attempts to assert his own power. While the power of nature is more blatantly invoked in the poem, since the mighty statue that symbolizes Ozymandias’quest for glory is in decay, the poem’s emphasis on the sculptor, the power of whose work still survives despite the wreckage of time, suggests that the artist’s power may be at least equal to the power of nature. This power of the artist is asserted by Shelley’s writing that the sculptor’s ironic depiction (“the hand that mocked”) of the emperor’s haughty facial expression (the “wrinkled lips, and sneer of cold command”) survives as the still-present “stamp” of passion on the otherwise “lifeless” pieces of stone.

You could argue that the sculptor will ultimately be defeated, as the statue will continue to decay over time, but there are really two artists involved in “Ozymandias": the sculptor who creates the statue that—despite the effects of time and decay—outlives the work of the monarch, and the poet Shelley, who has created the sonnet we are now reading.  In both cases, the power of this ruler (all rulers?) and the power of nature are overcome by the artist—or perhaps by the power of Art, if you prefer to believe that both artists are working under the influence of a transpersonal  or transcendent source of inspiration. Whether or not the poet Shelley is being equally arrogant is another question we have to ask, and which I leave up to you.

Here's an excellent video performance of the poem (by Lance M. Foster) that captures the sublime effect: