The park is clearly preferable to a railway station, not only because it is more idyllic for the scene of an erotic encounter, but also because it is a Dionysian setting, preferable to the crude, structured Apollonian setting of a railway station. In a park, one may readily lose oneself in the eroticism of nature and become one with the natural environment. This is surely preferable to hanging around the filthy men's room of a railway station, "tallying up the merits of each / / of the latrines," in O'Hara's words.
The poem clearly links the theme of homosexuality with Dionysus on an emotional level, as well:
So we are taking off our masks, are we, and keeping our mouths shut? As if we'd been pierced by a glance!
The song of an old cow is not more full of judgment than the vapors which escape one's soul when one is sick;
so I pull the shadows around me like a puff and crinkle my eyes as if at the most exquisite moment of a very long opera, and then we are off!
A without reproach and without hope that our delicate feet will touch the earth again, let alone "very soon."
The references to music and opera are key here, not only because the poem has an operatic lilt to it in tone, but because music has traditionally been associated with the realm of Dionysus, most famously in Nietzsche's famous book on the Apollo and Dionysus myths, the Birth of Tragedy - a book that was dedicated to the German composer Richard Wagner.
Despite this musical concern, "It is the law of my own voice I shall investigate," as the poet states in the following line. Does this not echo the Apollonian quality of ego? Our question is answered in the following lines of the poem:
start like ice, my finger to my ear, my ear
To my heart, that proud cur at the garbage can
In the rain. it's wonderful to admire oneself
With complete candor [...]
While O'Hara teases the reader with an Apollonian...
The horn, like Saturn, Is suspended in its ring of steering wheel; And below is the black tongue of the gas pedal, The bulge of the brake, the stalk Of the stick shift, Lines 17-21) The simile, "like Saturn" succeeds in expanding on the image of the car in adding a sense of its larger symbolic meaning. The other images also tend to provide the car with natural attributes - such as a tongue. In the final
Thus, Sharon Olds' poem progresses through a series of interesting images, which analyze the relationship between the Apollonian and the Dionysian states, that is, from the pure individuality to a state of merging with the other and overstepping the boundaries of the self. Yusef Komunyakaa's poem has a similar structure. In his Facing it, the author rememorizes an experience from the Vietnam War. The poem starts abruptly with the image
" 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. What each of these three poems has in common is the fact that they are based around images of human figures confronting the Dionysian motifs of descent and ascent via nature. Each poem represents a struggle between the Apollonian and Dionysian extremes, a struggle that is
In this reading, Dobyns' "Counterparts" is his statement of personal philosophy that argues the only way to reach the Apollonian ideals is to work with, and embrace, the Dionysian and thus create a whole, or a yin-yang. This practice of using the Dionysian in order to achieve the Apollonian is a common strategy used in Dobyns' poetry. Likewise, poet Frank O'Hara also uses Apollonian themes in the majority of his
" Dobyns's poem, at first glance, seems to be built on the exact opposite terrain. With a remarkably more somber tone, "Counterparts" appears to exemplify the Apollonian qualities of clarity, restraint, and sobriety in the construction of a work of art that is meant to mirror an occurrence in the real world and thus formulate an experience through the guise of art, via form. "This is a country of smaller wars,"
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