The Supreme Power of Time

From the opening line Shelley asserts the dominance of time, thanks to the geo-temporal descriptor “an antique land” (1). The most powerful feature of the land is not its ruler or any of its built environment, but its antiquity. The following lines introduce another form of power: that embodied by art. Though the “sneer of cold command” (5) suggests that the statue found in the desert once represented a ruler of some sort, Shelley does not reveal its identity as King Ozymandias until the sonnet’s sestet, or final six lines. The opening eight lines, or octave, instead present readers with a power struggle between the remains of a once-giant statue and the sands of the desert. Though the statue’s “vast” (2) legs still “Stand in the desert” (3), the sands appear to be winning out, as the statue’s face is “Half sunk” (4) and...