Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

English Lit - Ozymandias

1. Read as a criticism of people/systems that become huge and believe themselves to be invisible

   • E.g. 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty and despair!'

2. Pride comes before a fall

   • Ozymandias boasts about his power, which now seems hollow

3. Even the mightiest will fall

   • Ozymandias thought his works would last forever but nothing is intact and his statue is broken

4. The first line are from the narrators POV and the rest are from the 'traveller'

5. Poem is a sonnet but it doesn't have the same simple rhyme scheme

   • no clear stanzas, just blocks broken up by punctuation