Visual Art (motif)
Throughout "Having a Coke With You," O'Hara frequently alludes to artists and works of arts to create a poetic portrait of his lover, while using the differences between his lover and these famous works to explore the distinction between art and life. Visual art is both a touchstone and tool: it provides a point of reference that readers can use to gain a better of sense of what the speaker means and feels, and imagine how the speaker's lover must appear to him on this particular afternoon. Additionally, the speaker uses these nods to visual art to suggest that language—his medium of choice—is just as powerful as a paintbrush, because he is able articulate how unlike these famous images his lover appears, how no painting he has seen matches his lover's form.
Statuary (symbol)
While statuary could be classified under the motif of visual art, O'Hara's lack of specificity when describing the statues he encounters in the park suggests its symbolic purpose in the poem. Like paintings, statues freeze a figure in time. Their three-dimensionality could make a statues appear more life-like than the most exquisite portraits, but at the the time, their medium makes statues appear hard and cold and nonhuman, no matter how beautifully sculpted their facial expressions and musculature may be. His lover's movement is so graceful that it makes the statuary seem unreal: for, given the grace and ease of the lover, how could anything be "as still and/ as solemn as unpleasantly definitive" as the statue beside them? The speaker aligns his lover with these works, only his lover is "better" and more real than the art itself.
