How are ideas about power presented in Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley?

The poem reflects on abuse of power, but by dwelling on the transience of mortal existence shows that even powerful dictators must fall. Although the dictator's power seemed 'vast' at the time, he (Ozymandias), was unable to achieve ultimate power, immortality. As a result his domination was incomplete and 'trunkless'. Now all that is left of his vast empire is a 'colossal wreck' of his statue, alone in a desert. Arguably, the poem articulates from a postcolonial perspective the inevitable collapse of imperial power.The plurality of voices in the poem is another way in which power -narrative power- is disarmed. Although we frequently think of the narrator as possessing godlike power over the story and therefore how the lives of those in the narration are remembered, here our narrator is detached. The narrator relates a traveller's story of encountering an artist's reading of the actual subject of our poem (Ozymandias). We even have Ozymandias' voice indirectly conveyed by the sculptor on the pedestal - 'Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!' - as a fourth layer. Shelley uses this poem to deconstruct Ozymandias' conception of mortal power as invincible, there is a sense that his arrogant challenge to God with his world goods received divine justice and punishment.