Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” is the first sonnet I ever read. It is a peculiar but famous poem, brief yet rich with meaning. I still don’t understand what it means fully. It always disturbed me that only the “traveler from an antique land” gets to speak. What was the poet’s response? Was his response the poem? Or did he have no real opinion on the matter? The poet mentions a lot of body parts and their condition: “trunkless legs,” “shattered visage,” “frown,” “wrinkled lip,” “sneer,” “hand that mocked them” and “heart that fed.” So clearly the traveler and the poet were in a better state than Ozymandias, who has been levelled by the “level sands” and whose great power has been disfigured and “mocked.” But it’s now been a couple hundred years since “Ozymandias” and now both the poet and the ancient traveler are also dead. They reside only in the words of this poem. Ozymandias has found his immortality ironically in a poem that mocks his immortality. Mock is a keyword in the poem. It has two conflicting meanings: the first meaning we all know: to make fun of something. The other meaning of mock is to copy. So, I understood the phrase “the hand that mocked them” to be the sculptor’s hand which (un)faithfully duplicated (or “stamped”) the “passions” of Ozymandias in an otherwise “lifeless” statue. The sculptor is so good that even Ozymandias’s “heart” could be felt in that statue. But then I realized that maybe there was another way to read the poem. And of course, “read” happens to be another critical word in the poem itself. The sculptor was able to “read” or interpret Ozymandias and chisel him out from stone. Suddenly, I began to wonder if the sculptor not only reads “well those passions” of Ozymandias but is also reading Ozymandias’s “hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.” But what is “them” referring to then? “Them” could only be the “passions” of Ozymandias himself. But then, why would Ozymandias “mock” his own passions? Was there some kind of meaning lost between the heart and the hand? Or is the original interpretation better? Are the hand and heart referring to the sculptor’s own bodily possessions? I can’t really decide which is more correct. I guess I could simply look this up, but part of the fun of these things is that you try to arrive at your own sense of things.
Poems allow you to come up with your own meaning, and there’s no worries even if you are wrong. Because how can we be wrong about what we are feeling or reading? And besides, we will all end up like Ozymandias anyway: the poem may survive, but the figure that it salutes and mocks left the stage a long, long, time ago.
