Everyone remembers the last image: two vast and trunkless legs of stone in an empty desert, and a boast on a pedestal that time has made ridiculous. What most people don't know is that Ozymandias began as a competition.
A sonnet-writing contest
In late 1817, Percy Bysshe Shelley and his friend Horace Smith set each other a challenge: write a sonnet about ancient Egypt. Smith's effort is largely forgotten. Shelley's became one of the most quoted poems in the English language. They were reacting to news that the British Museum had acquired a huge fragment of a statue of Ramesses II — "Ozymandias" was the Greek name for that pharaoh.
Shelley never travelled to Egypt. He never saw the statue. The whole poem is built at a distance — he even frames it as second-hand, told by "a traveller from an antique land." The ruin is a rumour of a rumour.
The trap inside the poem
The famous inscription — My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; / Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! — was meant as a threat. Look how much I built; despair of ever matching it. But time has flipped the meaning. There are no works left to look on. "Nothing beside remains." The line that was supposed to intimidate now mocks the man who spoke it.
That reversal is the whole poem. Shelley doesn't argue that power is temporary; he just shows you an empty desert and lets the boast echo into it.
Wear it
Our Ozymandias tee carries the famous line with an engraved motif of the ruined statue, and the complete sonnet printed on the back. Wearable literature — the whole poem, not just the quote.