The speaker who begins the poem relates a tale once told to him by a traveler he'd met. This traveler had been to the desert, where he saw the broken pieces of a once-great statue all scattered and half-buried by the sand. The traveler saw "trunkless legs" here and the bits of a shattered face there, as well as the pedestal on which the effigy used to stand. From the inscription on that pedestal, he learned that the statue depicted a man called Ozymandias, a king who evidently believed that the many great deeds he accomplished in life would grant him a kind of immortality and that his fame would never die. However, when the traveler describes the "colossal Wreck," he is referring to the wreck of the statue that commemorated Ozymandias, a statue that has all but been lost to the sands of time. From this, we can see that the statue is a symbol of human mortality; we are all forgotten eventually.