"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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‘There remains,’ wrote Heidegger in his Holzwege, or Forest Paths, ‘the song
that names the earth.’ Postmodernity proclaims that all marks are textmarks;
ecopoetics proposes that we must hold fast to the possibility that certain textmarks
called poems can bring back to our memory humankind’s ancient knowledge that
without landmarks we are lost. (Bate 2000: 175)
Livingstone, too, appeals to ancient earthly knowledge which rests in the keep of poets:
“Under Africa’s moon there dreams a strand / older than old the ancient poets keep”; and
yearns to express this “with poems we have not yet begun” (LZ 39).
I am aware that I repeatedly refer to the Romantic sublime and fail to define it. It
evades definition. The following passage from Alan Paton’s Too Late the Phalarope
eloquently expresses both the emotional aspect of the sublime and the difficulty of
quantifying it:
… and the piet-my-vrou would cry from the kloof, which was like a hand
suddenly plucking on the strings of the heart, so that your whole being shook and
trembled; and why and why, why no one knew, it was the nature of man and of
creation, that some sound, long remembered from the days of innocence before
the world’s corruption, could open the door of the soul, flooding it with a sudden
knowledge of the sadness and terror and beauty of man’s home and the earth. But
you could not keep such knowledge, you could not hold it in your hand like a
flower or a book, for it came and went like the wind; and the door of the soul
would not stay open, for maybe it was too great joy and sorrow for a man, and
meant only for angels. (48-9)
According to Percy Bysshe Shelley, poets serve the double function of
“legislators” who elucidate the present order of things and “prophets” who foresee how
the present situation will affect the future. 4 Bate echoes this idea in a chapter called
“What are Poets For?”:
What are poets for in our brave new millennium? Could it be to remind the next
few generations that it is we who have the power to determine whether the earth
will sing or be silent? As earth’s own poetry, symbolized for Keats in the
grasshopper and the cricket, is drowned ever deeper – not merely by bulldozers in
the forest, but more insidiously by the ubiquitous susurrus of cyberspace – so
there will be an ever greater need to retain a place in culture, in the work of
human imagining, for the song that names the earth. (2000: 282)
4 The full quotation is: “Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared,
were called in the earlier epochs of the world legislators or prophets: a poet essentially comprises and
unites both these characters. For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws
according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his
thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time. Not that I assert poets to be prophets in the
gross sense of the word…” (in Reiman and Powers 482-3)