Perhaps the most striking feature of "Ozymandias" is the setting in which the traveler finds the statue's ruins. Though Shelley's description of it is brief, the significance of it is obvious, as the poem concludes:

. . . boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Shelley conveys both the enormity and, perhaps paradoxically, the monotony of the landscape. It is empty and it stretches on forever, in contrast to the impermanence of Ozymandias himself. It is not only that Nature is an immense power against which man is nothing, but that the physical bleakness of the desert is an analogue to the emptiness of the vast stretch of time between this ancient despot and the present. Nature is a vast force: the winds and sands have swept away all of Ozymandias's "works" as well as wrecking the iconic symbol of him the sculptor created. But in its infinite reach, Nature is, in some sense, shocking to the human who contemplates it, forcing us not only to acknowledge our powerlessness but to recognize how frightening the immensity and the endlessness of time and space are.