"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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the final stanza is that humankind fails to see its impending and self-inflicted doom,
brought about by its deafness to the signs and rhythms of nature.
Midnight also serves as a trope for an ecological climacteric in “The Midnight
Lamia” (AU 21). This poem explores psychic malevolence towards nature through the
incapacitated old woman who takes the form of a mythical monster or lamia. In the
opening line she is an “old invalid”, but she metaphorically wreaks ecological havoc and,
by the end of the poem, becomes an earthslayer who, as her “scythes” (line 29) destroy
the growing crops, becomes a more frightening form of the grim reaper. Chapman claims
that “the old hag effectively emerges as a personification of nightmare” (1981: 155). I
would argue rather that she personifies ecological destruction. The nightmare is that this
destruction is mindless and cold-blooded. The poem is firmly founded in myth through
the reference to the Lamia and to the surreal world of the astral travelling of the old
woman as vampire, the demon or monster who sucks the blood of children in the Greek
myth (Brewer 620). The poem is about the psychic power of the incapacitated to feed,
vampire-like, off the life force of the Earth and so destroy it. If read in this way, the
poem’s ecological implications are chilling. The old woman as the lamia figure
metaphorically represents a destructive force which will suck dry the lifeblood of the
Earth. But, beyond the metaphor, there are real implications. It is the ecologically
damaging psychic malignancy she represents which is terrifying.
In the first stanza, time (symbolised by the moonlit sundial) is sabotaged. The old
woman’s psyche is compared to a fuse which connects to a keg of gunpowder placed on
the sundial or keeper of time. She ignites the fuse (line 1) and the implication is that time
will explode. The second stanza finds her travelling and preying on the “hapless mice”
(line 14). She metamorphoses into the form of a predator, a cat which “purrs rage” (line
14). The natural landscape is portrayed as idyllic in “the mastfilled evenings, cloudlit
skies, / warm night of drifting leaves” (lines 11-12). After stanza three’s surreal picture of
the psychic world, the poem returns momentarily to the invalided woman in her bed and
then to her predatory, psychic state. She is “cat-eared, unblinking, treed; hear-seeing all, /
not comprehending all” (lines 27-8). Here she metamorphoses into a tree, becomes as
nature for she sees and hears “all” with her cat ears. She becomes a conscious part of the
web of life on Earth. But – and this is the crunch – she does not comprehend “all”. Such