"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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tricky term with layered meanings and the human relationship with nature is highly
complex. It is not for nothing that Raymond Williams links the complexity of the word
nature to the major variations in human thought (1976: 189). The OED defines nature as
“The creative and regulative physical power conceived of as operating in the material
world and as the immediate cause of all its phenomena… these phenomena collectively”.
Jonathan Bate points out that this part of the definition would include humankind ( 2000:
33). The dictionary definition of nature also glosses: “the material world; specifically,
plants, animals, and other features of the earth itself, as opposed to humans or human
creations or civilization”. This part of the definition indicates an opposition between
humans and their “civilization” and the physical world of nature. Livingstone here
specifically explores this opposition. Through the actions of the profiteers and
perpetrators of cruelty on the one hand, and through the response of the poet on the other,
these poems offer a dialectic. The actions of the perpetrators show that society is the
negation of nature (Bate 32) and that nature is regarded by humans as the “Other” (35).
Bate (quoting Rousseau) argues that “conscience” is the “voice of nature” working within
us (35). In the above poems Livingstone, in effect, speaks for voiceless nature and so
pricks the human conscience. Through the Romantic sublime he is reading the voice of
nature and communicating on its behalf. Nature is here seen as something beyond the
material chemical processes of life and thus acquires a voice; it is imaginatively
personified.
In discussing the opposition between man and nature and a possible panacea to
this alienation, Bate argues that:
Society is the negation of nature. The work of the thinker is to negate the
negation, to accuse civilization, which is characterized by its negativity with
respect to nature. (32)
Livingstone may be seen as the “thinker” who does “accuse civilization” in these poems.
His accusation is in particular against profit-making and its consequent cruelty.
One of the themes of “Old Harbour” (26) is human alienation from nature
through sea trafficking for profit. The personified harbour, portrayed as an empty
nurturer, is depicted as the matriarch of a materialistic world. The harbour is an impostor,
a deceiving mother figure who is “pretending suckle” (lines 1 and 22) and is “aborting
nurture” (line 19). For Livingstone, the true mother or Creative Principle is embodied in
the sea itself. Does this poem imply that true nurture can only be found in nature itself?