"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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political poet (see chapter two for a discussion of the critical material) and that his
alleged ‘political incorrectness’ pales into insignificance against the wider ecological
issues (the future of the human race) which his poetry addresses.
I claim that the ecological message behind the poetry is of paramount importance,
that Livingstone’s voice should join the small chorus of those who plead with humanity
to stop the unthinking abuse of the Earth and try to avert a future of ecological doom. I
am aware that my ecological presuppositions may, in places, be as overdetermined as
previous political presuppositions (see also p 30). I try to substantiate my ecological
interpretation by relying on what the poems say and on various articles by and interviews
with Douglas Livingstone which point to his ecological view. For example, the phrase
“ecological despair” which I will use repeatedly is Livingstone’s own (Robbins 1992:
52). Because Livingstone’s aim to help heal the planet is never expressed explicitly in his
published poems, I have relied heavily on biographical information to support my
argument that he was an (errant) ecological campaigner. Interestingly, an unpublished
poem titled “In A Littoral Zone” contains this line: “a turning to an urge to heal the earth,
its waters”. In another, four-line unpublished poem “Giovanni Jacopo Meditates (on the
Myopia of Medicine)” he unequivocally criticises humankind for its ecological abuse of
the Earth: 2
Only one Lifeform is misbehaving
– Pity we cannot ban it:
Rife Humanity needs no saving,
Only the wretched Planet.
In this thesis I use only the latest versions of the published poems of Douglas
Livingstone and have not considered the variants in the poems. The collections I have
used are now all out of print. However, a new volume of collected poems has been edited
by Malcolm Hacksley and Don Maclennan and is to be published during the course of
2004 (after the completion of this thesis).
Livingstone’s awareness of nature is strongly evident throughout all his poetry.
There is a significant shift from predominant land imagery in his earlier works to sea
imagery in his final collection. This can be biographically linked with Livingstone’s
move from inland Africa (Zimbabwe and Zambia where he worked as a pathologist) to
2 I am grateful to Mr Malcolm Hacksley, Director of NELM, for giving me copies of these poems.