Dionysian Analysis of Three Poems

¶ … Dionysian Analysis of Three Poems

The Apollonian and Dionysian dichotomy has frequently been employed as a departure point for the critical evaluation of poetic works. In the following essay, I propose using those qualities typically associated with Dionysus - that is, the integration of the self into the whole, the life and death cycle (the myth of descent and ascent), the natural world, and the ecstatic - in order to analyze poems by Brenda Hamilton, Sharon Olds, and Yusef Komunyakaa. I hope to show that the Dionysian tendency, rooted in the belief that man plays a role in the drama of eternal repetition that is grounded in the cyclical view of nature, is present in these works and informs each poet's mythic vision of the universe.

Of the three poems I intend to discuss, perhaps the most readily Dionysian example is Brenda Hamilton's "On the Pier." In the Nietzschean conception of the Dionysian, Dionysus is presented as a symbol of the opposite of morality - that is, as a force that celebrates life, in opposition to the Christian morality that denigrates life in its aspirations towards the attainment of the eternal, of some unknown paradise.

In Hamilton's poem, which begins with the line, "I'd like to walk out on ignorance like this," we never get to find out what the "this" is that Hamilton is referring to. In the following line, Hamilton elicits a description of the ignorance as a physical object: "Long and brown like the ignorance of myself." Ignoring the adjectives for a moment, one immediately notices that the "ignorance" the poet wishes to walk away from is the same ignorance that she locates within herself. Thus, it is implied that what the poet wants is to actually leave herself behind - to leave the human body. But where does she intend to go?

To the sea, apparently:

See the water shimmer and jump,

See the birds find something they could accept, would be voicelessly condemned, a bad

Sailor walking the plank, hearing the boards

Cry out like the boards of an old desk,

Slightly gaping, wet with a collection of mornings.

Here, we are witness to the poet turning away from the Apollonian world of order in a full embrace of wild nature, which finds its fiercest expression in the sea. Obviously, the poet has not yet immersed herself in the sea itself, but is standing near the shore - that which divides the human world from wild nature, the Apollonian from the Dionysian.

Of course, the Dionysian may not function by itself - it relies on the presence of the Apollonian in order to attain its full meaning. The Apollonian is always attempting to temper the wild impulses of the Dionysian, but it is to the latter that the poet devotes herself in the end of "On the Pier."

Interestingly enough, the poet seems to associate ignorance, that thing she wishes to run away from at the beginning of the poem, with the Apollonian. Near the end of the poem, she writes: "At the end of the pier, at the end of this ignorance, / I'd celebrate." Celebration serves as a disruption to the calm and order imposed on humans by the Apollonian; the poet wishes to depart from this sobriety into a sort of liquid ebullience, dramatized not only by the sea, but her desire to become drunk with the sea: "The sea, like many wine glasses tipped, 'Here's to you - you know nothing at all!' "

It is Apollo who "knows nothing," that force of corporeal authority and rationality - the enemy of all true poetry, in the Nietzschean tradition of the Apollonian and Dionysian dichotomy. In order to become one with the sea and nature - the true embodiment of poetry - that is, the poem itself - the poet must leave behind this world that attempts to deny all ecstatic, pure experience and join that chaotic whirlwind that is ultimately characterized by the Dionysian tendency.

While Dionysus can be readily found in Hamilton's poem, it is perhaps more difficult locating the Dionysian in Sharon Olds's poem "The Guild." This is due no doubt to the fact that the tone of Olds's poem is much more melancholic, eliciting the image of a young man seated next an old man in front of a fire.

The poem clearly takes place at night, during a period of "downtime," away from the Apollonian currents of the imposed work day, as the two men are drinking: "the bourbon like fire in his hand," the young man drinking alongside the old man, etc. It is inferred that the old man is teaching the young man in the ways of the world: "that was his son, who sat, an apprentice." And later: "And he drank when the old man drank, and he learned / the craft of oblivion." The old man, Olds infers, has nothing to teach the young man other than Dionysian excess - in this case, taken to an extreme in the form of alcoholism.

The inference here is that this "teacher," the old man, is in fact not a very good role model for the young man to follow, because he has not learned to temper the Dionysian aspects of his life with the Apollonian. He devotes a disproportionate amount of time to the former - in the form of alcoholic idleness - than he does to the working and being productive. As we stated earlier in our discussion of Hamilton's poem, one needs the Apollonian as a means of tempering - and defining - the Dionysian.

But that world - the Apollonian universe - is conspicuously absent from Olds's poem. We may only draw inference of its existence in this dialectical universe from its absence in the poem. Instead of referring to structures or aspects that might identify an Apollonian setting, a referent to the "real world," the only indication we are given is that the poem takes place in a "darkened room" - that is about as detailed as Olds gets on the Apollonian front.

The poem's imagistic details are instead caught up with fire, that eternal symbol of spontaneity, impulsiveness, chaos: "in the darkened room in front of the fire," "the bourbon like fire in his hand," "glittered meaninglessly in the light from the flames," "drinking steadily by the flames in the blackness." That is quite a lot of fire for such a short poem!

Olds uses these Dionysian elements to evoke a tender, moving image of a generational "guild," father and son, who, momentarily isolated from the wear-and-tear of the Apollonian universe, are able to share a quiet moment, seemingly unaware of the "cruelty and oblivion" with which they are endowed in that other realm.

The anthropomorphic creature that figures in Yusef Komunyakaa's poem "Pride" seems to be a hybrid of nature and mankind - half-bird, half-man. He is introduced in the opening stanza of the poem:

Crowned with a feathered helmet,

Not for disguise or courtship

Dance, he looks like something

Birthed by swallowing its tail

While clearly identified as male, even his gender is presented as fluid midway through the poem, when he morphs "into a double reflection. / Silhouetted almost into a woman." This is key for our analysis, as Apollo is typically personified in masculine figures, while Dionysus features prominently in feminine qualities.

As with our analysis of two other poems, the shadow of Apollo is elicited in the figure of Dionysus, which features prominently in Komunyakaa's poem. Komunyakaa's subject is pride, as his title makes clear; this is an emotion that is typically foreign to the modest, rational Apollo. While the setting of the poem is seemingly rooted in the Apollonian, human realm of culture - the "hilltop house" in which the subject of the poem views as gender-bending double reflection - the poem ends with the figure gazing out into the wilds of nature, "overlooking Narcissus's pond / choked with a memory of lilies." Communing with nature is the ultimate Dionysian act; the poet's subsequent writing of the communion is the Apollonian gesture that tempers this Dionysian indulgence.