Dichotomy of the Apollonian and Term Paper

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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," the speaker tells us:

You have your office and ranch house, your foreign car

And family. You are still not necessary. I see

Your face in a photograph from the war, surrounded

By soldiers convinced by their smiles. [...]

But in this poem, which seems to be in homage to someone who the speaker has lost in a war, the illogical, wild whims of nature continuously interfere with the speaker's attempts at making sense of his lost, thus pointing to the Dionysian motif of the wholeness of existence, the fact that all boundaries separating our categorical notions of nature, life, and death are ultimately interconnected. This is why the speaker's body, emotions, and interactions with/observations of the natural world continue to intersect throughout the course of the poem:

All things desire

To be surrounded by stone. There is rain on my hands.

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There is the steady thud of birds falling into hills

Sloping with sheep. We memorize the art of decay.

A swift and pervading gray slips through my fingers,

Cloud covered and accustomed to war. A bone

Is my weapon. It may not have been mine. [...]

The fact that the speaker is unsure about whether or not "the bone" he evokes as his weapon was his once again unites the Apollonian with the wild uncertainties that characterize the Dionysian motif. As such, "Counterparts" in many ways evokes the Apollonian and Dionysian as counterparts that can never be separated from one another. The poem begins in a fairly straightforward, clear manner ("There is no sky today"), only to end in chaos and confusion ("There are rumors/of summer. There are seasons no longer acceptable.")

Dobyns's poem is remarkably distinct from O'Hara's in tone, structure, and subject matter, but they are similar in that, like all great works of art, their thematic unity is based on an intertwining of the Apollonian and Dionysian motifs. Both of these motifs imply a rejection of reason as an ordering factor, which is why poetry, of all the arts, is the clearest embodiment of the impossibility of separating Apollo and….....

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