I guess the Elder Wiseman pose
wears out eventually too, with all that annoying attention from the congregation
of young know-nothings clamoring to be enlightened. “Young things” really
refers to the young women. It’s a common enough phrase, “young thing,” and easy
enough to skip over, but why “thing”? Other, alien, inhuman, that’s why. Female.
The male figure of power and accomplishment is the standard that establishes
what is ideal and human. Women, especially the young ones, don’t fit that. They
are something other, the Dionysian
element of sexuality and revelry, opposed to the Apollonian reason and order
which the speaker is a bit smugly trying on for size. Might as well since there
isn’t much Dionysian vitality left in the fellow anyway. The girls don’t know
that and they keep coming, though, drawn like moths to the candle of fame and the
wise man’s perceived intelligence. Overflowing with all that thrumming sexual
Dionysian energy, they crave the male figure’s calm, upright rational power—right?
The poem veers into a quick Dionysian fantasy: “until I drop the Bacchae in its
slot: / take that! and that!” The Bacchae is where all this
Apollonian/Dionysian structuring comes from, and look, “drop the Bacchae in its
slot” is a naked sexual reference. Not a nice one, but there it is. Get ready
because I’m about to get all Dionysian on you, Sweetheart. “Take that!” is a
violent sexual thrusting. It’s over in two lines. Then his brain returns to
accumulating its fat. The reality of now is age, impotence, fatigue. The Apollonian
is nothing more than a ruse, a cover-up, a pose disguising emptiness. There is barely
enough mental energy enough for it, but the Dionysian erotic vitality was spent
long ago. The irony is that it takes balance to be fully human: The women are perceived
as little Dionysian sexpots, still basically animalistic without the Apollonian
rationality they crave as they flock to the poet’s readings. But with his
Dionysian energy long ago expended, the speaker is a stuffed jacket with
leather patches on the elbows cowering behind the wizard’s phony beard. Even
less human than the frisky young women who are screaming at him.
Once so sexy and alluringly maddening
in their incomplete but powerful female sexual selves, they are still better
now than what they will eventually become. That rhyme of “mother” with “smother”
is a brutal one. Knives—for castration
purposes—and smothering are what’s in store for the man exhausted of his
Dionysian virility. “I will stay the night” he says—he’ll bed one yet anyway—because
that’s what a man does, but without a challenging Dionysian strength of his own
to match hers, to fight it off, really, the result is ugly. He’ll have nothing
much to say—a quick reference to writing and language as elements of male
vitality—and as a result he will be smothered. Brilliantly smothered. It’s
lights out for yours truly, Henry, in the powerful female’s castrating,
smothering embrace.
Ugh…
Oh, and then there’s the unstated but implied arrogance of the speaker imagining himself as the stalwart Apollonian figure in the first place, albeit a now-empty one, hollow as a bronze statue. But that’s for another day…
Oh, and then there’s the unstated but implied arrogance of the speaker imagining himself as the stalwart Apollonian figure in the first place, albeit a now-empty one, hollow as a bronze statue. But that’s for another day…
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