In Percy Bysshe Shelley’s sonnet “Ozymandias,” the poet describes the remnants of a sculpture of the thirteenth-century Egyptian Pharaoh Rameses II, known for his ostentatious and excessive temple-building for posterity. Shelly learns from a traveler “from an ancient land” background information on the ruins in a desolate desert. They consist of two huge stone legs and a nearby, half-buried “shattered visage” with a frown, a “wrinkled lip,” and a sneering, domineering expression. The sculptor who created this statue captured the subject’s tyrannical personality; the statue’s details

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things.

What the poet means by “which yet survive” is that despite the decay of this dictator’s statue, his fervent feelings of authority still exist and show in the ruins. Any of the answers (A. Outlast, B. Live C. Display, D. Coexist) can fit or replace “survive,” but the strongest choice is A, “outlast.”

Ozymandias, the “King of Kings,” ruled with arrogance; he demanded that people admire his accomplishments, saying, “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair;” that command sounds like “read ‘em and weep!” Yet ironically, his power cannot survive the passage of time and the battering of nature. The poet reveals that the king’s bluster is all hot-air hubris, because despite Ozymandias’s monument to himself, it is reduced to a decayed and bare “colossal Wreck” in the middle of nowhere surrounded by no one and nothing but “lone and level sands.”

Nonetheless, the sculptor was able to “read” and recreate Ozymandias’s pomposity as well as his disdain for others. In fact, this unflattering portrayal with its projections of overweening pride “which yet survive” have actually outlasted the physical body of the statue. Strong and mighty in life, Ozymandias is now a disabled, dismembered figure. Through words, his arrogance has outlasted the destruction of his monument; both the traveler and Shelley the poet have revived Ozymandias’s spirit and allowed it to endure and outlast the visual piece of art.