Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem encompasses the theme of death because it is about the passage, of all worldly things and people, into oblivion. The pharaoh Ozymandias constructed great works to make others fear him and the control he exercised over people and the environment; he intended others to despair that they could not achieve as much as he had. By the time the traveler from the antique land tells the story to the poem’s speaker, Ozymandias himself is long gone. Shelley encourages the reader to remember that even those items that were intended to impress people are not going to last forever. The desert sands remain, but only broken parts of the pharaoh’s enormous statue are visible. Not only is the pharaoh himself dead, the location of his tomb itself seems to have been forgotten.
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