Delving into Shelley’s Iconic Poem

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” is the first sonnet I ever read. It is a peculiar but famous poem, brief yet rich with meaning. I still don’t understand what it means fully. It always disturbed me that only the “traveler from an antique land” gets to speak. What was the poet’s response? Was his response the poem? Or did he have no real opinion on the matter? The poet mentions a lot of body parts and their condition: “trunkless legs,” “shattered visage,” “frown,” “wrinkled lip,” “sneer,” “hand that mocked them” and “heart that fed.” So clearly the traveler and the poet were in a better state than Ozymandias, who has been levelled by the “level sands” and whose great power has been disfigured and “mocked.” But it’s now been a couple hundred years since “Ozymandias” and now both the poet and the ancient traveler are also dead. They reside only in the words of this poem. Ozymandias has found his immortality ironically in a poem that mocks his immortality. Mock is a keyword in the poem. It has two conflicting meanings: the first meaning we all know: to make fun of something. The other meaning of mock is to copy. So, I understood the phrase “the hand that mocked them” to be the sculptor’s hand which (un)faithfully duplicated (or “stamped”) the “passions” of Ozymandias in an otherwise “lifeless” statue. The sculptor is so good that even Ozymandias’s “heart” could be felt in that statue. But then I realized that maybe there was another way to read the poem. And of course, “read” happens to be another critical word in the poem itself. The sculptor was able to “read” or interpret Ozymandias and chisel him out from stone. Suddenly, I began to wonder if the sculptor not only reads “well those passions” of Ozymandias but is also reading Ozymandias’s “hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.” But what is “them” referring to then? “Them” could only be the “passions” of Ozymandias himself. But then, why would Ozymandias “mock” his own passions? Was there some kind of meaning lost between the heart and the hand? Or is the original interpretation better? Are the hand and heart referring to the sculptor’s own bodily possessions? I can’t really decide which is more correct. I guess I could simply look this up, but part of the fun of these things is that you try to arrive at your own sense of things.

Poems allow you to come up with your own meaning, and there’s no worries even if you are wrong. Because how can we be wrong about what we are feeling or reading? And besides, we will all end up like Ozymandias anyway: the poem may survive, but the figure that it salutes and mocks left the stage a long, long, time ago.

Lee’s Poetry

In the collective, individual desires must be reconciled for the benefit of the whole. Although these ideals are slowly changing in favor of the spirit of individuals of the new generation, we can see that, at least in poems by Li-Young Lee, an ethnically Chinese born in Indonesia and residing in the U.S., that family dynamics are central in his poems.

“Eating Together” is a short, one stanza poem about a family having some trout together. Ingredients such as ginger, onion, and sesame oil add details that evoke both taste and smell for readers, while the members of the family, including two brothers, sister, and mother accompany the narrator for a meal. We aren’t sure what other kinds of food are available for the family members, but nothing else is mentioned here, except the fish in the steamer. 

The meat of the head is especially delicious, as mentioned by the narrator. It is savored collectively, as the meat is held between the mother’s fingers, “deftly, the way my father did…” Subconsciously, I am led to read the overlapping image of the head of the fish and the narrator’s father, the head of the household, as both dead. The fact that the head is prized by all implies that the father was, too, prized by all. 

The verse reading implies that the father is gone, as it says, “Then he lay down to sleep like a snow-covered road winding through pines older than him, without any travelers, and lonely for no one.” The poem takes an interesting turn for the father, one without travelers, and yet, “lonely for no one”. The emotional tension is strong because of this strangely conflicting description of the father, who is loved by his family, but at the same time, read as a person without accompanying travelers. Does the poem mean that, towards death, everyone is alone? In that lone journey, does that person doesn’t have to be lonely for anyone?

Much is left unsaid at the end of the poem that readers can ponder, explore, and imagine what it is like to leave behind a family. Also, what does it mean to have family members eat together while a person is gone? What is the meal all about in the absence of the loved one?

The poem is powerful because of its simplicity of language. The words are clear and even sparse. However, this doesn’t negate the poem’s overall complexity. The poem is intriguing, as the words have power to show what they want to show, but it is equally powerful because of what it doesn’t show. It doesn’t overly explain the relationships between the father and his family. Rather, the poem focuses on the meal itself, and the father is mentioned at the end, trailing off. Naturally, I want to know more, and so, readers are compelled to read into the poem. We are participants of the gathering. The meal isn’t just for the family but for us, the readers. People who have lost their loved ones, or can imagine what the loss may be, can ponder and reflect on this moment together.

“Eating Together”

In the steamer is the trout   

seasoned with slivers of ginger,

two sprigs of green onion, and sesame oil.   

We shall eat it with rice for lunch,   

brothers, sister, my mother who will   

taste the sweetest meat of the head,   

holding it between her fingers   

deftly, the way my father did   

weeks ago. Then he lay down   

to sleep like a snow-covered road   

winding through pines older than him,   

without any travelers, and lonely for no one.

Profile on Landers

                                                                                                                    (hammer.ucla.edu)

Down to earth, Brandon Landers paints mainly about his black community, familiar faces with whom he grew up. An artist in his mid-30s based in Bakersfield, California, lives in a shack near his friend’s house, often sleeping on an upper bunk above the piled canvases and splattered paint.  He is far away from his origins in South Los Angeles, as his main job is teaching art to young children at an elementary school in Bakersfield, an environment much different from what he was used to.

I came across Landers’s artworks surfing through the Internet. I guess I was trying to explore what kinds of visual artists are really out there, really connected with their communities.

Amidst emerging figurative artists, Landers is one of the few black artists who has jumped into the pool of those painters, who, in his own terms, has painted with his own interest in subject matters and applications of medium surrounding the black human experience.

In spite of public’s growing interest in his artworks, Landers has been good at keeping them at bay. He feels awkward and uncomfortable dealing with them or even the kind of fame some emerging artists tend to seek. He sees his working process in transition. I read in one of the articles. He said, “Once I get into a bigger studio and feel more comfortable, then I’ll make that decision.” It seems that Landers knows how fame can get to one’s head, a starting point for failure.

Without a doubt, Landers is strongly connected to his family and roots. His mother, who passed away at 55 without having a chance to see her son’s exhibition, provided love to his son that he remembers to this day. Growing up in South Los Angeles, Landers was kept away from the dangers of inner-city pitfalls by his mother, who always guarded him and guided him towards benevolent paths in life. In that protection, Landers found drawing as a way out, but also a way to dive inward towards creativity. His love for art deepened in high school when he injured himself and couldn’t play basketball, which furthered his practice in art. 

Watching his family, friends, and relatives growing up around him, Landers feels blessed by their support system, but he also knows that many of them have not found their way out of their environments for upward mobility. As such, their stories are shared on the canvas, painted in ways that Landers knows how, pigments applied with palette knife in crude manner, resulting in irregular surfaces. The faces of these beings are distorted, often in groups, with their toothy grins, sometimes situated against backdrop of backward texts.

The space in which all these figures inhabit is spatially suspended, devoid of clear grounding. Element of surrealism kicks in. Several curators agree on one thing – Landers is really taking off. Vikki Cruz, a former curator at the Bakersfield Museum, and Connie Butler, the Hammer’s chief curator, both praise Landers for his tenacity to practice and delving into fully embodied humanity. The colors of humanity, for Landers, are black, brown, yellow, and red, the tones of familiarity for the Black Angelenos, whose lives have been fraught with both violence and support from each other. 

I personally have not been exposed to black art until now, not a contemporary figurative painter such as Landers. His paintings are humble but unapologetic about approaches to painting and themes, both pulling back in modesty and pushing forward for attention.