"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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wall which divides the poet and the scientist has been ‘dissolved’ by “that synthetic
and magical power”, the Imagination.
Like Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, Livingstone’s “The Wall
Beyond Station X” is a poem of pure imagination (as Robert Penn Warren calls the
former). In “The Rime” the mariner kills the albatross, seemingly unthinkingly, and then
embarks on a nightmare journey of thirst, becalmedness, storms, loneliness, pain, death in
life, dreams, nightmare, penance, homelessness and the need to keep retelling his story.
He carries the dead albatross around his neck as a metaphorical cross on this journey. The
albatross can be read as a symbol of Coleridge’s “poetic genius” (BL 166). His shooting
of the bird “of good omen” (Coleridge’s gloss to stanza 20) is a fall from grace which
spirals the mariner into a quest to regain the blessed state – a state implied by the arrival
of the albatross at the start of the sea voyage in Part I. The mariner’s quest is a search for
atonement which mostly eludes him. In Part VII of the poem the Hermit cannot shrive the
mariner; he can only offer him temporary relief through the telling – and consequent
retellings – of his story.
There are similarities between “The Rime” and “The Wall”. Both are poems
about the questing imagination in which the sea is both the setting and a trope for the
unconscious and for creativity. Both questors encounter strong winds, both are solitary
figures, and both poems offer no resolution. Most importantly, both are an allegory for
the creative process. The sun is a dominant image in both poems, although “The Rime”
also uses the moon. 47 In “The Rime” the sun is a metaphor for the primary imagination,
for when the sun is shining the mariner is powerless to bring about any change in his
situation. It is in the moonlight – a metaphor for the secondary imagination or human
creativity – that the mariner is inspired, and is able to change his situation.
The most striking difference between “The Rime” and “The Wall” is the presence
and absence of God. “The Rime” is centred around the redeeming power of God and
contains numerous references to blessings, saints and prayer. The mariner seeks
47 For Coleridge, the sun and the moon signify what he called the primary and the secondary imagination
respectively. Coleridge called the primary imagination the “infinite I am” (BL 159) and said it represents
the life force, it is the prime agent which perceives. It is through the primary imagination that we know the
world. The secondary imagination represents human creativity for it “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in
order to recreate: or when this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize
and to unify” (BL 159-60). The primary and secondary imagination are its passive and active aspects
respectively.