Theme · 10 poems

Poems About Power

Look on my works, ye Mighty: poems about empire, ambition, and what the sand keeps once the statue falls.

Poetry has a favourite argument about power, and Shelley wrote its definitive version in fourteen lines. 'Ozymandias' (1818) reports a ruined statue in a desert — two legs, a shattered face, and a pedestal boasting "Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!" The joke is structural: nothing beside remains. The boast survived, the empire did not, and the poem lets the sand deliver the verdict without editorialising.

That is the shape most power poems take: not argument but evidence. They put a monument, a title, or a conqueror next to time and let the reader do the arithmetic. Shakespeare works the same seam in the sonnets, where verse is offered as the only monument likely to outlast marble — a claim that happens to have been correct. If you are reading in this theme for a class or a speech, 'Ozymandias' is the one to start with: it is short, it is quotable, and its irony is doing something you can point at.

LengthForm

Ozymandias

Percy Bysshe Shelley · 1818

I met a traveller from an antique landWho said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stoneStand in the desert...Near them, on the sand,

14 lines · sonnet

The New Colossus

Emma Lazarus · 1883

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,With conquering limbs astride from land to land;Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

14 lines · sonnet

I, Too

Langston Hughes · 1926

I, too, sing America.I am the darker brother.They send me to eat in the kitchen

18 lines · free verse

The Second Coming

W. B. Yeats · 1920

Turning and turning in the widening gyreThe falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

22 lines · lyric

The Charge of the Light Brigade

Alfred, Lord Tennyson · 1854

Half a league, half a league,Half a league onward,All in the valley of Death

55 lines · narrative

Ode to the West Wind

Percy Bysshe Shelley · 1820

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves deadAre driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

70 lines · ode

Paul Revere's Ride

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · 1860

Listen my children and you shall hearOf the midnight ride of Paul Revere,On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;

130 lines · narrative

I Hear America Singing

Walt Whitman · 1860

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,

11 lines · free verse

London

William Blake · 1794

I wandered through each chartered street, Near where the chartered Thames does flow,A mark in every face I meet,

16 lines · lyric

Concord Hymn

Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1837

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,Here once the embattled farmers stood

16 lines · lyric

Common questions

What is the most famous poem about power?

Shelley's 'Ozymandias' (1818) — a sonnet about a collapsed statue whose inscription still boasts of an empire that no longer exists.

What is the message of Ozymandias?

That political power is temporary and cannot protect itself from time. The poem never says so directly; it simply describes the wreckage and quotes the boast beside it.