“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
These lines occur in the sestet of "Ozymandias", a famous sonnet by P. B. Shelley, a revolutionary poet of the Romantic period. Here the pride of Ozymandias has been suggested.
An Egyptian king called Ozymandias ordered a sculptor to erect his statue on a pedestal on which these words were inscribed. The message of the inscription is clear. The king was very powerful. He treated other kings as his subordinates. He proudly invited the weaker kings to look at his statue and get disappointed because his statue reflected that he was more powerful than others. Even if there were any mighty king, Ozymandias was confident, he would be frustrated to find out that he was inferior to Ozymandias. But with the passage of time, the pride, pomp and power of this powerful king turned into a heap of ruins. The poet here implies the irony that human power and greatness are temporary. For this reason, they are futile.
