As a Romantic poet, Shelley was deeply respectful of nature and skeptical of humanity’s attempts to dominate it. Fittingly, his “Ozymandias” is not simply a warning about the transience of political power, but also an assertion of humanity’s impotence compared to the natural world. The statue the poem describes has very likely become a “colossal Wreck” precisely because of the relentless forces of sand and wind erosion in the desert. This combined with the fact that “lone and level sands” have taken over everything that once surrounded the statue suggests nature as an unstoppable force to which human beings are ultimately subservient.

Shelley’s imagery suggests a natural world whose might is far greater than that of humankind. The statue is notably found in a desert, a landscape hostile towards life. That the statue is “trunkless” suggests sandstorms eroded the torso or buried it entirely, while the face being “shattered” implies humanity’s relative weakness: even the destruction of a hulking piece of stone is nothing for nature. The fact that the remains of the statute are “half sunk” under the sand, meanwhile, evokes a kind of burial. In fact, the statement “nothing beside remains” can be read as casting the fragments of the statue as the “remains” of a corpse. The encroaching sand described in the poem suggests that nature has steadily overtaken a once great civilization and buried it, just as nature will one day reclaim everything humanity has built, and every individual human as well.

The desert, not Ozymandias, is thus the most powerful tyrant in Shelley’s poem. It is “boundless” and “stretch[es] far away” as though it has conquered everything the eye can see, just as it has conquered Ozymandias’s statue. Ozymandias may be the king of kings, but even kings can be toppled by mere grains of sand.