" 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 very much part of every human being's life. In Hamilton's poem, the poet is quite eager to run away altogether from Apollonian order into the wild chaos of poetry and the sea. It does not take much convincing for her; from the moment the poem opens, she is ready to go. Olds's poem represents a more virulent struggle between the two poles. While the father in the poem has clearly made his choice and has learned to live with it, for the younger man, the son, the journey will be a much longer road, Olds infers, marked by pain and suffering. In Komunyakaa's poem, wild Dionysus is consistently present from the beginning in the form...

The poem plays not only with this dichotomy between man and the animal kingdom, but between man and woman as well. While rooted in the scene of Apollo's domain - a "hilltop house" - nature is not far away, and it is to wild nature that the figure in the poem's gaze ultimately turns.
As our interpretation of these poems has established, it is not possible to have Dionysus without Apollo. Apollo is constantly there to serve as Dionysus's shadow, and vice versa. It is through the Apollonian and Dionysian, the ways in which they unite and the ways in which they disperse, that we may identify poetry's mythical conception of the universe, while simultaneously showing the ways in which it intersects with our own day-to-day realities.

Bibliography

Parisi, Joseph and Stephen Young, eds. The Poetry Anthology, 1912-2002: Ninety Years of America's Most Distinguished Verse Magazine. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002.