Dionysian Analysis of Three Poems by Hamilton, Olds, and Komunyakaa

Introduction: The Apollonian and Dionysian Framework

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 grounded in the cyclical view of nature, is present in these works and informs each poet's mythic vision of the universe.

Brenda Hamilton's 'On the Pier': Embracing Wild Nature

Of the three poems under discussion, 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 witness 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. 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 by the end of "On the Pier."

Interestingly, the poet seems to associate ignorance — the 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 by her desire to become drunk with it: "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. 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 ultimately characterized by the Dionysian tendency.

Sharon Olds's 'The Guild': Dionysian Excess and Absent Order

While Dionysus can be readily found in Hamilton's poem, it is perhaps more difficult to locate 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 to 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 workday, as the two men are drinking: "the bourbon like fire in his hand," the young man drinking alongside the old man, and so on. 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 — rather than to working and being productive. As noted 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. 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, and 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.

Conclusion: Apollo as Dionysus's Necessary Shadow

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 a 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 of the figure in the poem, who is apparently half-man and half-beast — a hefty dramatization of the sublimation of Apollo into Dionysus. 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'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.