"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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analysis on p 170 of “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Black Snake” in A Littoral Zone,
for a fuller explanation of the symbolism of the snake). The theme is deeper than mere
predatorship. In the penultimate stanza the poet communicates with the snake and her
fury appears to abate: “Her eyes dulled from blood-red” (line 34). Yet he still shoots the
cobra because he is in fear of her “waiting stalk” (line 35). He then justifies or
rationalises his action in the final lines: “I had to shoot; I mean / that now her limp grey
life lies understood”. This understanding only comes by way of killing and is therefore
somehow empty – it is not clear if the speaker does (or can) understand the life of the
snake. The poem points to the question of whether it is possible for the human race to
know its place on Earth and is an important precursor to “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a
Black Snake”.
How to find or know one’s place (i.e. to attain ecological equilibrium) is a crucial
problem. There are two possible ways: through knowledge and through the imagination.
Whether either are sufficient is debateable, for what is sought is an ideal position.
Livingstone intermittently grapples with the yearning for this pastoral or utopian ideal of
man united with nature in his earlier work. The themes of evolutionary theory and
ecological equilibrium are closely connected, for an understanding of where we come
from would, arguably, lead to our knowing how to be or live on Earth. Evolutionary
knowledge leads to a physical understanding of humankind’s position within the natural
framework while what I call ecological equilibrium points to a psychic understanding of
man’s place on Earth. In an essay “The Sense of Place”, Seamus Heaney writes about the
importance of the imagination in identifying with this “sense of place”:
… our imaginations assent to the stimulus of the names, our sense of the place is
enhanced, our sense of ourselves as inhabitants not just of a geographical country
but of a country of the mind is cemented. It is this feeling, assenting, equable
marriage between the geographical country and the country of the mind, whether
that country of the mind takes its tone unconsciously from a shared oral inherited
culture, or from a consciously savoured literary culture, or from both, it is this
marriage that constitutes the sense of place in its richest possible manifestation.
(132)
This points to the importance of art (rather than a biological understanding of
humankind’s position in the living world) in attaining ecological sensibility.
Two early poems which use the pastoral to explore a state of ecological
equilibrium are “The Time of Sowing” and “Bamboo” (S 29 and 38). Both are about