Point of View

“Ozymandias” is framed by a first-person “I,” whose presence is subsumed into a third-person narration from the second line on. The traveler who assumes the poem’s narration never speaks from his own first-person point of view as he describes the fragmented statue in the desert. The scene communicated by the poem is thus told from a largely omniscient point of view, offering almost a bird’s eye-perspective of the ruined monument. But even this seemingly omniscient perspective is filtered through the subjectivity of the “traveller from an antique land” (1), who interprets what the statue’s features “Tell” (6) about its sculptor and subject.

The shifting temporal perspective of the poem heightens this subjectivity. The poem opens with the speaker recounting in past tense the traveler he “met” (1), who then describes in present tense a scene from the desert. Two legs “Stand in the desert” (3) while...