"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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humanity has no future place on Earth, is facing extinction because of his self-centred
blundering and unecological lifestyle.
The final two stanzas explore humankind’s self-preoccupation through the trope
of the man looking at his reflection in the pool. The penultimate stanza first warns that he
may not like what he sees through the suggestion that he spit into the pool to disturb the
reflection. The evident self-parody is that, in doing this, he will spit at himself and so
express self-disgust. Further, “you and your quarry” (line 27) are the same thing, given
that he is looking at his own reflection in the pool. He is, therefore, hunting or preying
upon himself as well as inadvertently searching for himself. The man’s blinkeredness is
further emphasised through the allusion to Narcissus, who unknowingly fell in love with
his own reflection (Brewer 745). In the final stanza the man is told he will find “it” (his
quarry) in the reflection of himself, which has “wavering mad eyes”. This is a strong
indictment of humankind’s shiftiness and lack of reason. Nature is given the final word
through the leaf which lies at the bottom of the pool. This leaf “never speaks first”,
implying that nature will not commune with man; it has to be the other way round. This is
in line with my argument that what is critical is humankind’s relationship to nature and
not – as is sometimes claimed in ecological discourse – the relationship between man and
nature (see p 16). “Discovery” is the most explicitly ecological poem in Sjambok.
“Midnight Touches” (13) is the only poem in Eyes Closed Against the Sun
which deals with the theme of ecological destruction. It is a chilling doomsday poem,
written in four stanzas. The terror lies not so much in the gangsterism and domestic
violence of the central stanzas, but in the encroachment of modern, urban evil on the
countryside. The “midnight touches” of the title are not sentimental, pretty pictures but
rather a warning that the end of a cycle (midnight) approaches (touches) humankind. The
sheep, symbol for the stupid animal, is the harbinger of this message. This image is
deliberately subversive, implying that the “unconscious” humans (depicted through the
transferred epithet as farmhouse windows) are more stupid than the sheep which are
traditionally regarded as unthinking. The sheep are skittish and “alarmed” (line 14) while
the farmers sleep on in blissful ignorance, “unconscious” of the gathering apocalypse,
“the stockpiling storm” (lines 15 and 16). In the face of this, the ministrations of the
hospital staff in the first stanza are futile. While the main focus of the poem is the humanon-human
violence portrayed in the two central stanzas, the subtle ecological import of