The opening line and half of the poem introduce two of the poem’s speakers: the “I” of the poem who meets a traveller, and the traveller whose words make up the rest of the poem. Put another way, these lines establish a structure in which the speaker acts as a kind of frame through which the reader is exposed to what the traveller has seen. The speaker has never actually seen the land the traveller comes from, nor the statue that the traveller will go on to describe.
The reader, then, encounters the statue through first the words of the speaker, and then also through the words of the traveller. By building such a layered structure, Shelley begins to establish the thematic importance of art in the poem and the way that art, and interpretations of art, can reverberate from one person to the next.
It's also worth taking a few moments to consider the traveller in the poem. On the one hand, the traveller can be read as being exactly as described: a traveller coming from a journey in a land with a deep history—an ancient, or "antique," land. However, there is a second way to interpret the traveller.
Shelley was inspired to write "Ozymandias" after reading the ancient Greek writer Diodorus Siculus’s description of a real-life statue of Ozymandias. As a result, it's possible to argue that the traveller from an ancient land who the speaker encounters actually is Siculus himself and that the meeting between the speaker and traveller actually occurs when the speaker reads Siculus’s account.
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