"Ozymandias" by Percy Bysshe Shelley

""'Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'" Line 11

       This entire poem is one giant metaphor for the inevitability of man's mortality. Shelley uses vivid imagery, talking of the "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand[ing] in the desert..." to show the loneliness and barren atmosphere of this spot that was once a great center of a mighty kingdom. There is no doubt ancient Egypt was a powerful and innovative civilization that ruled the world for thousands of years. Their vast empire was remarkable in its efficiency and organization. However, it too, as all great civilizations do, fell. Greece followed this pattern, followed by Rome, and in our modern world, the British Empire and the Soviet Union. The irony is in the words on the engravings that remain, that this Pharaoh was so conceited as to tell others to despair when they saw the might of his kingdom. He is now the king of sand and desert, and his once great civilization is nothing more than ruins now.