"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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This densely layered poem explores the questing of the men who set sail from the
harbour. Their metaphorical destinations are contained in the highly symbolic cities of
“Byzantium and Samarkand” (lines 4 and 24) which, apart from being ancient trade
centres, also represent art and the spiritual (see W.B. Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium”).
These men are “seeking life, seeking love” (line 11). The Durban-based poets Fernando
Pessoa and Roy Campbell are included in the group of seekers in “How many a
Fernando, how many a Roy” (line 13). The poetic process therefore forms part of this
quest for spiritual fulfilment.
This poem’s examination of the misuse of nature through materialistic greed and
the resultant abortive nurture is strongly evident in the penultimate stanza. The harbour
itself is an inanimate object and is therefore powerless. The real subject of the poem is
the human greed and human longing which the harbour fosters. In personifying the
harbour Livingstone directs his venom at the materialistic as a constructed process. If he
were to rail at human greed, the poem would not carry the same import.
Another poem which exposes human greed is “Beach Terminal” (36). This poem
recounts the butchering which occurred at the now closed whaling station. The following
poem in the sequence, “Bad Run at King’s Rest” (37), tells the story of a mauled
loggerhead turtle. In these poems humanity’s self-imposed alienation from nature is
portrayed through the exploitation of the whales and the cruelty towards the loggerhead
turtle. Human profit-seeking and cruelty become cousins in “Beach Terminal”. The
poems are unsentimental yet powerful accounts. Livingstone makes the reader acutely
aware of the wantonness of the “thick-skinned bread” (“Beach Terminal” line 16). But,
the underlying twist to the poems is that those unfeeling and unthinking perpetrators of
cruelty are part of the human race, just as we, the readers, are. In both poems human
cruelty is symptomatic of human alienation from nature.
“Beach Terminal” is framed by stanzas written in the present tense. Stanzas two
to six recount, in the past tense, the bloody activities which took place at the whaling
station. The penultimate stanza returns to the present tense and Livingstone’s activity of
collecting sea samples. He says the sea is “slimy with reject, / with whale-washings,
hereabouts unclean” (lines 27-8). This contradicts his statement in the first stanza that the
sea is “clean now”. This can best be read as metaphorical: his memory of the activities at
the now abandoned whaling station has polluted his mind. The whale-washings are the