Joke’s on you, Oz! Can I call you Oz? Who cares! You’re just some rubble in the desert.Įxcept, according to the Romantic scholar Paul Fry, the poem is up to something far more complex than poking fun at a pharaoh’s empty dreams of immortality.

“Shattered” and “half sunk,” the “wreck” languishes in “lone and level sands.” Given Shelley’s anti-imperial leanings, the scornful takeaway seems obvious: So much for all that arrogant posturing. The sculpted likeness, which bears his “wrinkled lip” and “sneer of cold command,” is inscribed with a boast: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings / Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” By the time we encounter the colossus, though, it has fallen into ruin. A great tyrant, otherwise known as Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II, has apparently commissioned a monument to his lofty works. We’d always thought of “Ozymandias” as a textbook example of dramatic irony-the gulf in understanding between a character speaking lines and an audience hearing them. As we prepared to put away our notes from high school English class, though, we had a “You’re Doing It Wrong: Shelley” moment. Here at Brow Beat, Sharan Shetty made a case for why “Ozymandias” and Breaking Bad go together like ephedrine and red phosphorus: Both center on figures of passionate, monomaniacal ambition both explore the (weirdly seductive, or at least commanding) nature of evil, especially as pitted against a more impersonal but equally violent power-time.

Percy shelley sonnets