"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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notes the “universality” of his poetry (32). He playfully but astutely calls Livingstone
“a Casanova in modern dress” (11).
The principal critical text on Douglas Livingstone’s earlier work is Michael
Chapman’s Douglas Livingstone: A Critical Study of his Poetry (1981). It covers
Livingstone’s first five collections of poetry in chronological order, devoting a separate
chapter to each work. Chapman has written prolifically on Livingstone: his other critical
texts include a substantial chapter on the poet in South African English Poetry: A Modern
Perspective (1984) 14 as well as a section in Southern African Literatures (1996).
In the introduction to his book on Douglas Livingstone, Chapman writes: “Critics
both in South Africa and in other countries have responded favourably to his talent”
(1981: 9) and summarises comments from the 1960s and 70s which by and large refer to
Livingstone’s treatment of the African landscape. The book as a whole explores this
treatment of the landscape and its fauna and flora, and Livingstone’s craftsmanship as a
poet. Chapman also notes:
The Times Literary Supplement (1964) adds that Livingstone makes the African
fauna and flora come ‘dangerously and aptly alive’. This is true; yet his subject is
not ‘Africa’ in any narrow sense
and suggests rather that “Livingstone’s subject is contemporary man” (10). This is only
partly correct. Livingstone’s poetry examines the place of contemporary man within the
world and on (of) the Earth. His treatment of the non-human world and the human
relationship with both the natural and artificial environment are, I suggest, also
predominant themes. (This is most fully developed in A Littoral Zone.) For example,
while Chapman’s analysis of the imagery and “echo rhymes” (78) of “Stormshelter” (S
11) is accomplished, I think he misreads the message of the poem when he claims “from
the eye of the storm we hear a person like ourselves, who is acutely conscious that the
‘Old Saws’, the once trusted systems, cannot account for his utter isolation” (78). The
poem is more about fear than isolation. Nature’s power, signified by the storm, induces
the fear in the central stanza:
‘Never stand under trees in a storm.’
Old saws have an ancient rhythm
in them; but these dry, far from bold
14 I am aware that this book has been updated and reprinted. The new edition became available when this
thesis was in its final stages and therefore has not been consulted here.