"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

across the precise line of continents:
the encounter of beach and earth…
(lines 10-12)
His reverie takes him into a pondering of the consciousness of the seagull and the
ant. He cannot fully enter the consciousness of the gull, cannot imagine where she sleeps
(line 13), and so he turns “to link with the preoccupied ant” (line 19). He first analyses
the ant’s position as “an apex” of the “invisible pyramid” of evolution (lines 22 and 23).
The lion, traditionally seen as the king of the beasts, is relegated to a lesser position: “the
lions are going, perhaps gone” (line 25). The implication is that the insects will inherit the
Earth. 25 Livingstone then turns to his own position as a man, physically “propped by
antibiotics” (line 26) on one hand and psychically nurtured on the other by the mystery or
elixir of nature, its “nutrients from the arcana” (line 27). The reference to the arcana and
the Medieval alchemists’ quest for the deep secrets of nature contrasts sharply with
modern medicine’s quick-fix use of antibiotics. Livingstone as ant then contemplates a
‘useful’ death where his remains become compost to feed the earth or, even, that his
organs could give life to another: “good cells even / in the cortices of strange kidneys”
(lines 29-30). He momentarily enters the consciousness of the gull in stanza 11: “Your
gull bullets through you, wake intact one / instant”. These two radically opposed
perspectives give a grand view but no overview, for the perspective-as-ant and the
perspective-as-gull cannot be experienced simultaneously. While these do give a ‘deeper’
view than that of “humanity, disconnected”, they are still both limited because, the poem
implies, there is no overall view or truth, only different perspectives.
He then again becomes the ant (stanza 12-15) and, in imaginatively adopting its
consciousness, he is able to “Descend” (line 37) and see the world as an ant might. He
describes this perspective as “a landscape empty as a man sees / on a dead moon, its cities
razed” (lines 38-9). This image of desolation and death may be connected to a lack of
imagination, for he then mysteriously or imaginatively ascends (stanza 14) and so has a
bird’s eye view of the ocean. This figurative overview affords him a glimpse of “a marine
purpose” (line 45). This refers back to the “marshallings of the all-night sea” (line 9), but
may also be an allusion to the aquatic stage of evolution. His reverie then ends: “The ant
25 In an interview with Fazzini, Livingstone said: “… wetlands are being drained for housing estates; where
are the birds going to reproduce? (If enough birds die, insects will inherit the earth!)” (1990: 142).
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