"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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inhabitants, also cleansed and refreshed, and projected as images on the “straightened
sheets” of an imagined movie screen. In short, he offers an idealistic portrayal or film
where reality is subsumed in art and daily chores become a heavenly activity, indicated in
the lines:
… a great
singing host
at stoves, shaving-mirrors, apples
in satchels …
(lines 41-43)
The poem returns to reality in its closing lines when we are reminded that this
“eccentric point” or moment of harmony with nature cannot be sustained, for it can only
“last you, yet: this round / of daylight, almost”. This poem shows a yearning for
ecological balance between the city and nature and humanity which can only be
momentarily achieved and then only in the poet’s imagination.
This imaginative identification with nature is also used to attain ecological
equilibrium in “Loving” (RB 32). This poem can be read on (at least) two levels. It can
be interpreted simply as a love poem to a woman expressed in natural metaphors. She is
compared to the earth, the sea and the sun. Or it can be read ecologically, where human
love becomes a metaphor for a symbiotic state. The latter interpretation better explains
the power of the poem. In loving the woman, the speaker finds atonement, since the
woman leads him, through love, to an “unsullied earth” (line 3): he perceives her as an
organic being through “the elements and compounds” of which she is constituted. In the
second stanza she comes to represent the sea, and therefore the Creative Principle,
through the “ineluctable tides” within her which he is powerless to resist. This leads him
to a state of “knowing” (line 7) that the woman is part of the Earth for her hair becomes
as grass, her skin as sun (line 12). Through her he “knows … the latency” or underlying
condition of existence (in biological terms, latency indicates a disposition which remains
concealed until the necessary conditions for its development are supplied (OED)):
Knowing you I know
– O, grass as hair, skin as sun –
the latency to which there is a key:
behind your tranquil breasts
subtends a sea.
(lines 11-15)