@Wali The house style of Genius is to annotate fully, with good written English. Bullet points and abbreviated notes aren’t recommended.

@Wali I’ve kept the long annotation because so many good contributions – fourteen of them – have been integrated. Every one is excellent.
They are all worth retaining. It is rare to have this volume of ideas, but the poem is hugely significant and complex.

Remember also this is a communal site, so it will be a loss to trim these down. Other Shelley poems are more concise.

The phrase ‘far away’ denotes that even nature want to escape this/ridden this statue.

The way this is written makes it sound like the most climactic ending ever, and I love it.

The following lines are about the statue, he is basically saying that it is worthless and powerless, which is why he refers to it as a colossal wreck. When the level sands are mentioned, it is referring to equality and no matter what, in the ned were all equal.

The caesura in “nothing beside remains. Round the decay” breaks up the line and contributes to sense of fragmenation. This mirrors the broken statue and the way Ozymandias' power has crumbled and decayed

The b’s and d’s are plosive sounds which implies that Ozymandias is alone in an empty world where nobody fears him anymore. The ‘b’ sounds symbolize how bitter Ozymandias is about being forgotten from his grave.

Behold the sheer emptiness of the desert around the statue, and realize that the statue, along with everything that it represents, is gone and will be forever. Almost to say that everything will eventually go away and be forgotten.

While Ozymandias was being cocky and prideful in the last part, it turns out his empire no longer exists. He now lay there as a disembodied statue, no one to worship him anymore to be forgotten by time. The ending to this poem is so great because it builds up Ozymandias as some great and powerful leader, only to then reveal his great empire is naught but dust, though his spirit still remains unable to let go of his pride alone and broken in the desert.

The use of alliteration in ‘lone and level’ emphasises the feeling of empty space in the surrounding desert.

It is a caesura: which means that there is a pause (full stop) in the middle of a line.

This evocative image of the desert, far more powerful than any human ambition might ever be, shows a typical landscape of the “poetics of the sublime”, in which nature makes the human being (even a king) appear small and fragile when compared to its vasteness and endlessness

This is meant to be somewhat humorous, in that the words say look at all I have built and yet there is nothing to see. The statue loses meaning after a few years, much like a signpost does if whatever it was originally pointing to doesn’t exist anymore. It’s like “look at all this great stuff.” And you go, “What stuff? I don’t see anything, just sand”
The whole poem is about the fact that all empires, like their emperors, die. Leaving only a tombstone(the statue) It’s just a matter of time.

The TV show, Breaking Bad, showed the life of a drug lord who believed he was invincible running his meth empire. “Nothing besides remains,” shows that just like Ozymandias’s rein as king comes to an end, Walter White’s hold of great power ended at his death. Power is but during a place in time, but in the end, time will tear confidence and over zealous powerful men down

“nothing beside remains. Round the decay”
“the forces of nature dwarf those of humanity” (Stephens 156). All that remains of the once great Ozymandias is the small portion of his statue that has succumb to much torment from nature.

Stephens, Walter. “Ozymandias: Or, Writing, Lost Libraries, and Wonder.” The John Hopkins University Press. v. 124 no. 5 (Dec. 2009): p. S155-S168. Scholars Portal Journals. Web. 27 Oct. 2014.

“The lone and level sands stretch far away”
Shelley uses sand as a tool to distance the reader from Ozymandias. The presence of sand is linked to the persistence of time. “…in a landscape of sand, the dust to which both Ozymandias’ “works” and nature itself have been reduced through the workings of time” (Janowitz 478).

Janowitz, Anne. “Shelley’s Monument to Ozymandias.” Philological Quarterly 63.4 (1984): 477. ProQuest. Web. 27 Oct. 2014.

I’d say expand your mind and consciousness

The reference alludes to the chessmen…bankers, government “The Man” controlling your life…
Feed your head is exactly that…Wake up to the slave status that they have relegated you to

Feed your head means expand your mind and consciousness whether through knowledge or drugs or whatever you see fit.

I used to inturputate this as a “Do it!” thing, but now later it makes more sense to me as “Educate yourself in the matter!”
Great stuff, cheers!

Mary Queen of Scots, was beheaded (brutally as it took a couple tries) and is often referred to as Bloody Mary giving the “Red Queen” a possible alternative to playing cards or from the other books.

lResident Evil.