"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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has, in effect, performed an act of conservation. His ecological atunement, shown
through his action of regenerating the bamboo, is qualified by his awareness of nature’s
greater – and destructive – power. This is described through the storm and flood in the
first part and through the drought in the latter part of the poem.
In Sjambok and Other Poems from Africa as a whole, the setting is rural inland
Africa where ecological equilibrium is more likely to be present. In the later collection,
Eyes Closed Against the Sun, Livingstone explores the possibility of attaining this state in
the city. The latter collection opens with a clutch of poems depicting lustreless city life.
Then “a.m.” (11) offers some relief when the city and the distanced second-person
speaker (who is presumably Livingstone himself) are refreshed after an early morning
rain shower. The speaker moves from a mood of despair in the opening stanza to one of
momentary euphoria in the final stanza. The real relief lies in that “eccentric point” (line
23) where the city-bound poet momentarily communes with nature. A fleeting ecological
balance is reached when the birds of the city join the “ancient fraternity” (line 25) of
nature, and the speaker imagines that he is “spreadeagled and wheeling / among them”
(lines 30-1). This change of consciousness is explored more fully in “Homoeostasis”
when the speaker ‘becomes’ an ant and a gull (see p 90). In “a.m.” the speaker also takes
on a more active role as a metaphorical laundryman or city cleaner who assists nature or
finishes off the laundering job started by nature. In the second stanza the rain has turned
the city into a “bundle of a rinsed / city” and the speaker imaginatively ministers to the
city by “hang[ing] up tenderly to dry / your sparkling towers” (lines 35-6), figuratively
becoming part of the natural cleansing process.
The city is personified as female in line 21, perhaps to signify that, despite the
“tangle of drains” and urban squalor, she provides a home and therefore some form of
nurture for the many city dwellers. Also, the city is ‘contained’ by indefinite nature in
“beyond this, a sea, / and beyond, a sun” (lines 23-4), alluding to Livingstone’s Creative
Principle. The lightened mood of the “city run / no longer to seed” (lines 18-19) infects
“her” inhabitants or “invented persons” (line 40) who become as angels, “a great /
singing host” (lines 41-2), as they go about their early morning activities. The city
dwellers are imaginatively transformed into “invented persons – / splendid persons!” who
are able to “lighten” the cleansed city’s metaphorical “straightened sheets” (line 39). The
speaker is imagining order and harmony and extends the laundry trope to include the city