"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

This is the death of earth.
(216)
For Livingstone as scientist “Dead water and dead sand” would be the effects of the
polluted sea water.
120
“The Black Knight” anticipates the motif of the knight errant in A Littoral Zone; it
is a camouflaged description of Livingstone’s scientific work and could be called a poem
of ecological action. The language is highly romantic yet the message of the poem is
starkly realistic: pollution will bring about the end of human life on Earth and it has to be
combated.
Two other ratiocinative poems in The Anvil’s Undertone also portray the poet as
knight errant or eccentric ecological champion. “Isotopes” 28 (60) postulates in a
sweeping statement that humanity has upset the ecological balance: “In an orderly
universe / only man is disorderly”. The problem, Livingstone claims, is “free-will”, and
the implied solution is “the choice of chivalry”. Chivalry encompasses love, eccentricity
and conviction, prerequisites for knight errantry. These are all important for they contain
a touch of madness and point to a resolution through comedy. Jonathan Bate argues for
the value of comedy as an ecological saviour. (See p 22 for a fuller discussion. See also
Joseph W. Meeker’s essay “The Comic Mode”, in Glotfelty 155-169).
This motif of chivalry is explored in more depth in “The Paladin in
Conglomerate” (AU 67). The paladin is the Christ figure. The title and the diction and
syntax are, perhaps, deliberately convoluted to obfuscate the poem’s criticism of Christ as
failed redeemer and the portrayal of Him as a knight errant who, therefore, was doomed
to fail in His valiant championing of the human race. Livingstone here explores a
chivalry devoid of the comic element where the tragic hero is doomed. It is nature which
is valorised in this poem. History and religion are shown to be destructive. The
ecological, then, rests on the firm foundation of "the stalwart anvil / of nature" (lines 1-2)
which is, as it were, beaten by history and religion. This conglomerate of culture is
imposed on nature and the world is "dissolved to disorderly clamour" (line 5). Christ is a
28 The OED defines isotope as: Each of two or more varieties of a particular chemical element which have
different numbers of neutrons in the nucleus, and therefore different relative atomic masses and different
nuclear (but the same chemical) properties. Also freq., any distinct kind of atom or nucleus. (OED)