"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

In your mystery & strength
You & your Benedictines
Pray will you cosset
This residuum of the moon’s
He addresses both Hildegard and her order presumably because her work lives on
through them. The Benedictines were a great civilising influence in early Western Europe
and are renowned for their learning. They are also teachers and manual labourers (Brewer
100). Does Livingstone appeal to them because he believes their efforts may contribute to
a more hopeful future? Is he asking that the spirituality of the Benedictines and the art of
Hildegard of Bingen be used as a stay against ecological destruction? The poem ends on
an inconclusive note: what is the moon describing? Beauty? Truth? Hope? Or the rhythm
of the Earth? Mircea Eliade argues that the lunar rhythms are an archetype for extended
durations:
[T]he ‘birth’ of a humanity, its growth, decrepitude (‘wear’), and disappearance
are assimilated to the lunar cycle. And this assimilation is important not only
because it shows us the ‘lunar’ structure of universal becoming but also because
of its optimistic consequences; for, just as the disappearance of the moon is never
final, since it is necessarily followed by a new moon, the disappearance of man is
not final either; in particular, even the disappearance of an entire humanity
(deluge, flood, submersion of a continent, and so on) is never total, for a new
humanity is born from a pair of survivors. (87)
Eliade’s use of myth to make sense of the world is akin to Livingstone’s appeal to art
(and spirituality) in this poem.
“Haunted Estuary” gives a more holistic view of the role of theology than does “A
Visitor”. In the latter poem intellectualisation gets in the way, both for both the reader in
reading the poem and for Livingstone in ‘reading’ the ecology. Both poems point to the
mystical, but where the figure of Hildegard herself is the mystic link, the theologians in
“A Visitor” sever rather than make this connection. There, it is the duiker which provides
the “holy event” in the poem.
In contrast to “Haunted Estuary”, “Coronach at Cave Rock” (29) concentrates
more explicitly on the role of art through the figures of the musician and the poet. It is,
broadly, about the lasting power of art. The “pieces will live” (line 30). But the poem
shows that fame is really just a by-product; it is the creative process and the power of
metaphor which are the central issues. Livingstone eulogises the work of the Austrian
composer Anton von Webern (1833-1945), and laments his untimely death.
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