"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

norms and maxims are scalpel-severed
by the sharp, needle-thin lightning,
frightening reason behind the eye,
slivered into land and abstract forms.
At the end of the poem the speaker uses reason when he decides to heed the “Old saws”
and leave the deceptive shelter of the tree: “There is only one thing to do – / wheel,
stamping, into that brittle rain” and so avoid the danger of being struck by lightning. The
old wisdom or folklore is not isolating, merely practical. Once the speaker of the poem
manages to contain his terror of the storm and regain his reason, the “Old saws” do their
work and save him. Chapman claims this poem contains
the central paradox of Livingstone’s vision: a striving for order, for ‘reason’, and
the recognition that it may be inadequate to account for the instinctual side of
man’s psyche – the painful awareness that synthesis of man and nature may be
destined to remain illusory. (79) 15
If there is a paradox to be found in this poem, it is that reason reunites the speaker with
his instinctual knowledge. The elusiveness of synthesis between man and nature is
certainly a recurring and predominant Livingstone theme, but it is not to be found, as
Chapman claims, in “Stormshelter”.
While Chapman correctly pinpoints the tension in Livingstone’s work between
human psychic awareness and the physical world, Dirk Klopper gives a more
sophisticated interpretation of this “paradox”:
The apparent contradiction of engaging ‘physically’ with something as seemingly
incorporeal as ‘consciousness’ serves to convey the paradox of Livingstone’s
poetry as a whole, in as much as this poetry is at once cerebral and sensual,
restrained and intense, serious and ironic. The idea of a consciousness
experienced in the realm of the physical shows that Livingstone’s concerns,
whatever their intellectual content may be, are never far from evincing an
awareness of the body and its non-intellectual modes of perception and
experience. (1997: 44)
Klopper’s observation points to the difficultly of labelling Livingstone’s philosophy and
aptly describes the recurring motif of the tension between the physical and the psychic.
15 Chapman does modify this statement in South African English Poetry: A Modern Perspective (1984)
where he shifts the focus of the paradox he finds in “Stormshelter” from the (non)relationship between
“man and nature” to that between humankind and science:
Here we have the central paradox of Livingstone’s insight: there is simultaneously a striving for
the ‘ordered’ response and a recognition of analysable instincts as well as primordial visions; it is
yet another variation of man’s dilemma under the dispensation of science. (1984: 108)
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