I don’t think I’d have liked Shelley. At least, that was my reaction after reading Richard Holmes biography of the man. He seems to be an instantly recognizable type of shit: the kind of leftist ‘lad’ who just happens to treats women badly, one after another.
My ‘poetry misreadings’ are dedicated to re-reading famous poems to look for the obvious, the obvious being quite regularly overlooked in traditional meanings and interpretations. Today, it’s the turn of Shelley’s Ozymandias.
The conventional reading is simplicity itself: a ‘traveller from an antique land’ (Egypt, surely), comes across a toppled statue, just its ‘vast and trunkless legs of stone’ still standing. And the moral could not be clearer: ‘Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ ‘Round the decay / Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.’ Sic transit gloria mundi.
But there’s this question: Who is Ozymandias? Read the poem carefully and anew, and the answer is not what you might assume. For apart from the traveller, and the statue, there is a third person involved in this poem: the sculptor.
Before we go further with this misreading, take a moment to remember Shelley’s famous contention that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’.
Back to Ozymandias. In fact the sculptor takes centre stage in this poem - we only know of the ‘wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command’. . . ‘the hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed' because the sculptor ‘well those passions read’ and only his work means they ‘yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things.’
And the sculptor’s name? We know, because he has signed his work, stamping it on the pedestal: the sculptor’s name is Ozymandias. It is his work, and his only, which survives. That’s why he can say truly: ‘Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ Because only the work of the artist Ozymandias survives its time, for travellers from an antique land to find. He is, in the end, ‘King of Kings’, though the loan and level sands stretch far away.
The irony, surely, is that Ozymandias is one of the most enduring poems of its time, and we still misread it as demonstrated proof of impotence in the face of time. When, in fact, it’s the opposite.