"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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The poem works with the idea of association. A holster stock inscribed with
the name “A VON WEBERN” (line 5) and found on the beach sets up an association
with the musician of the same name (stanza 1); the writer Anton Chekov is associated
with Anton von Webern (stanza 2); and various (unlikely) images are used to ‘describe’
Webern’s music (stanza 4). Association is a close cousin of representation or mimesis. In
his Poetics Aristotle defines poetry as an imitation (Greek, mimesis) of human actions.
M.H. Abrams explains: “By ‘imitation’ he means something like ‘representation’, in its
root sense: the poem imitates by taking some kind of human action and re-presenting it in
a new ‘medium’ or material – that of words” (83). In the poem Webern is depicted as
denying the idea that art represents life; art rather “enfolds” the essences that move
unseen beneath or through what we usually picture as ‘life’. For Livingstone Webern’s
music represents human yearning, the “unspeakable sounds of music from my skull”
(line 22). The evocative nature of the music is explored through the effect of its sounds;
through Livingstone’s use of words in the poem; and through the shape of the poem’s
four central stanzas where the blank zig-zag pattern reflects the “variation and space”
(line 17) within the music and invokes the silence between the notes.
The poem has two voices, that of the poet and that of the musician. In the opening
and closing stanzas, the driftwood and the shape it takes in the mind of the poet act as a
locus of association. In the final stanza the association between the poet and the musician
is compared to a game of chess: “my move” and “the piece” (line 31), where the “piece”
also refers back to the “small pieces” or compositions of the previous stanza. It is the
poet’s turn to answer to the voice of the musician. He does this by paying tribute to
Webern’s “long-lived notes” which, he implies, are more lasting or “durable” than
“headstones” or physical monuments to the dead.
Livingstone, as speaker in the first and final stanzas, frames the bracketed voice
of Webern (“I am Anton” (line 7)) who cryptically speaks from the grave. An American
soldier mistakenly shot him “at Mittersill in 1945” (line 6). The central four stanzas are a
virtuoso display of Livingstone’s poetic skill where the power of the musician’s art
speaks through the poet’s voice. Tony Morphet explains: “Just as it is, and is not,
Webern, this speech is, and is not, the voice of Livingstone. Similarly it is, and is not, an
account of Livingstone’s poetics” (206). In making the dead musician speak Livingstone
gives his account of Webern’s manifesto: to create art even though “the notes [are] so