"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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lightning” (line 14). The fig tree’s failure to bear fruit results in it being chopped down
by human hand and thus points to humankind’s callousness and alienation from nature.
The tree’s struggle is evident in “strived”, “straining, I tried” and “I sucked” (lines 2, 3
and 6). The tree is anthropomorphised by Livingstone and, in giving it a voice, he urges
the reader to imagine what it would feel like to be an executed tree. The tree bears no
malice towards the woodcutter “who came to pluck my fate” (line 8), and exonerates its
executioner: “not petulance nor angry whim / sparked in you” (lines 13-14). But the tree
does state that human destructiveness has taken place and implies in the final line that
this was done thoughtlessly, “you chose mine, perhaps for planks”. Its pain is evident in
the final stanza where “lightning” is wreaked on it as it is felled.
Livingstone, in making his readers imagine the struggle and the pain of the tree,
broadens the human ecological perspective and makes us aware, if not guilty, of
destructive acts against nature. The image of the fig is, probably, grounded in a Biblical
allusion to Habbakkuk, who waits in faith for God’s judgement upon the Chaldeans who
were guilty of unsatiableness, covetousness, cruelty, drunkenness and idolatry. God
destroys the natural resources which feed the people: “Although the fig tree shall not
blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labour of the olive shall fail, and the fields
shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut from the fold and there shall be no herd in the
stalls” (Hab 3:17). Livingstone allows the tree to comment on how insatiable human
covetousness might lead to reprisal or destruction of the sustaining Earth and asks us to
imagine the tree’s position.
Eyes Closed Against the Sun does not explore the theme of man apart from nature
in great depth. A single poem from A Rosary of Bone “The Genetic Blueprint in Roses,
Etc” (29), concentrates on humankind’s alienation from nature through scientific
meddling. The hybridised rose is an image for this scientific interference. The rose has
“no future” (line 1) and is “flawed” (line 9) for it cannot reproduce itself naturally. The
rose symbolises artificial selection rather than Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which
proposes that all living things are dependent on the genetic matrix for the continuation of
life on Earth. The rose is, further, a symbol for art. Through hybridisation this rose’s
natural beauty has been aesthetically heightened. The following lines indicate that the
rose performs the same function as a work of art:
who mark life’s joys and sorrows
lifting indelible