"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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is his anger extended to humankind which refuses to acknowledge the warning
contained in the deluge myth? His rage is communicated as a “fractious challenge” (line
23), which would indicate that he is railing against both nature and humankind.
The plural form of “scourings” in the title of the poem indicates that it contains
levels of meaning. The flood literally scours the land clean of man-made material, plants
and animals. The results of this cleansing action of the water are the “scourings” or debris
which have been washed into the sea and then deposited by the ocean on the beaches.
The poem deals with the results of these cleansing or purging actions of the water.
The first two stanzas describe the aftermath of the flood and the remaining three
give voice to the unlikely crow of the indignant bantam. The colourful and handsome
cock with his range of orange, brown, scarlet and black feathers mirrors Chaucer’s
Chauntecleer whose “coomb was redder than fyn coral” (line 2859, in Robinson 199), his
bill jet black and the colour of his feathers “lyk the burned gold” (line 2864). The bantam
is aptly compared to “chanticleer” because Chaucer’s Chauntecleer is the cock which
crows the loudest, “In al the land, of crowyng nas his peer” (4040) and who is said, by his
wife Pertelote, to have too strong an imagination which comes from “the greete
superfluytee / or youre rede colera” (2927-8). By alluding to this literary bird,
Livingstone emphasises the bantam’s delusions of grandeur. How can one bird, no matter
how loudly it crows, reverse the effects of this natural cataclysm?
In stanza four he "bellows" his "fierce" outrage as an “epithet” (lines 16 and 17), a
swear word, directed at the sun. This is not the rising sun, traditionally hailed by all
cocks, but a sun which has been cowed by the flood and which now seems wary and is
hiding (“crouched”) behind or on the horizon. The sun “hesitates / on the threshold”
(lines 18-19) as it surveys the flood damage or “all that vehemence” (line 19). The
bantam rails against this “vehemence” of nature and the “inexorability” of the ravaging
effects of the flood by chastising the sun for its cowardice. He wants the sun to come out
and the normal cycle of nature to return. This is why he is reduced to “polysyllabic
epithets” and not his usual daily greeting of the sun. He swears at the disruption and
cannot give the “All Clear” (line 20). The sun serves as metaphor for the energy of the
life force and for humankind’s need for rational order. Livingstone regarded the sun and
philosophy as masculine (Fazzini 1990: 140).