"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

can again be written in beads.
This is a love poem to the Earth and the allusion to the San people in the final
stanza is a call for a return to the time when humanity knew how to live symbiotically
with the earth. It is not so much a criticism of modern civilization (Chapman 83), as it is
an incantation (shown in “save me”, “grant me”, “accord me”) to the Creative Principle
for grace to live in harmony with the Earth, despite the violations of civilization. Marco
Fazzini rightly says this poem “appears to be a kind of intellectual inscription, or a
prayer, for a redemption of man’s abuse” (1991: 29). Priya Narismulu, also rightly, says
it is an “incantatory poem” which is “expressive of one’s particular response to the sense
of being inseparably part of one’s world” (156).
“The Sleep of My Lions” and “Drinking Wine” (Eyes Closed Against the Sun 17
and 43; hereafter referred to as EC) can be read as a pair for both poems are about the
yearning for ecological atunement or symbiotic existence on Earth. It is significant that
both poems are 31 lines long (a prime number divisible only by itself); they perhaps echo
the Japanese tanka, a poem of 31 syllables which gives a complete picture of an event or
mood.
Chapman also misses the ecological points in “Drinking Wine”. Here,
Livingstone as speaker slips into reverie of a mythic past which, according to Chapman,
“illustrates the dangers attendant on poetry which attempts to create a dream-world” (91).
He adds this poem does not include the element of confrontation which characterises
most of Livingstone’s best work and says it “is ‘poetical’ in the sense that it does not
communicate anything distinctively its own” (92). I am not sure what this sentence
means, but would strongly argue that the poem distinctly communicates a vision of
atonement with both the world and the Earth. This belies Chapman’s repeated assertion
that a strong preoccupation in Livingstone’s poetry is man’s alienation and isolation. The
poem both confronts history and life on Earth and communicates a sweeping vision of
interconnection, from the roots of the vine deep in the earth to the oceans and the essence
of drowned sailors, apprehended in and through the wine the poet is drinking: “The glass
cups blood / wood, iron and bread” (lines 18-19). The poem ends with the speaker
identifying imaginatively with all things – real and mythical – in the world:
Drinking, I drink
old mythologies –
men, gods, strange beasts;
66