Excerpt from Term Paper:
The recreation area is obviously preferable to a railway place, not only since it is more stunning for the scene of your erotic come across, but as well because it is a Dionysian environment, preferable to the crude, methodized Apollonian setting of a train station. Within a park, one could readily drop oneself in the eroticism of nature and be one with the natural environment. This really is surely preferable to hanging around the filthy men’s room of any railway train station, “tallying in the merits of each and every / as well as of the latrines, ” in O’Hara’s words.
The poem clearly backlinks the concept of the homosexuality with Dionysus by using an emotional level, as well:
Therefore we are removing our goggles, are all of us, and keeping our mouths shut? As though we’d been pierced by a glance!
The song of your old cow is not more full of wisdom than the vapors which avoid one’s spirit when one is sick;
so I pull the shadows around me such as a puff and crinkle my eyes as if at most exquisite minute of a long opera, after which we are off!
A devoid of reproach and without hope which our delicate ft will contact the earth again, let alone “very soon. inches
The sources to music and safari are key here, not only because the poem has an operatic lilt to it in tone, although because music has traditionally been associated with the realm of Dionysus, many famously in Nietzsche’s renowned book on the Apollo and Dionysus misconceptions, the Birthday of Tragedy – a book that was committed to the German composer Richard Wagner.
Naturally musical concern, “It is the law of my own words I shall investigate, inch as the poet states in the subsequent line. Performs this not replicate the Apollonian quality of ego? Each of our question can be answered inside the following lines of the composition:
start like ice, my own finger to my hearing, my ear
To my heart, that proud cur at the waste can
Inside the rain. really wonderful to admire yourself
With full candor [… ]
Although O’Hara teases the reader with an Apollonian reference to “the law, inches it is Dionysus who is controlling the courtroom, that is why the “investigation” of the poem ends in enjoyment – for doing it is the Dionysian id that may be ruled by the pleasure principle, and it is the pursuit of pleasure – with both the self and and others – that O’Hara’s poem is ultimately about. “It’s a summertime day, ” he says in the end of the poem, “and I have to be desired more than anything else in the world. ” This desire to engage, to desire and truly feel oneself desired, is representational of the Dionysian force that rules above each individual’s erotic life. It is captured perfectly in the lines of “Homosexuality. inch
But the many Dionysian top quality that is readily apparent in both of O’Hara’s poems is impulsiveness. Each one of the poems contains a light, airy feel to them, like they were dashed off in a single sitting. For the reason that they get particular occasions of feeling, the poet person felt you should not revise these people, to give in to the more Apollonian qualities of his persona that may require refinement and editing. Since close because Apollo may come to tempering Frank O’Hara’s more wild impulses, this individual ultimately provides no higher god than Dionysus, that supreme grasp of never-ending desire. Most likely this is why these types of poems are really timeless in their evocation of wild character and lust for life.
Bibliography
Deutsch, Helene, M. D. A Psychoanalytic Study with the Myth of Dionysus and Apollo: Two
Variants of the Son-Mother Marriage. New York: Foreign Universities, 69.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birthday of Tragedy, 1871. Retrieved November 22, 2007 at http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/Nietzsche/tragedy_all.htm.
Parisi, Frederick and Sophie Young, eds. The Poetry Anthology, 1912-2002: Ninety Years of America’s The majority of Distinguished Passage Magazine. Chi town: Ivan R. Dee, 2002.
Thro, Jordan. “Apollo or Dionysus: The Only Theme Your Students Will Ever Need on paper about Books. ” VCCA Journal, Quantity 10, Number 2
