"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

the stones, slaked battles, seas;
the oil and olives from lost argosies.
Chapman incorrectly claims these lines display a Keatsian desire to “drink and leave the
world unseen” (92). I argue the opposite; the speaker is absorbed into the world, imagines
himself as part of the mysterious sweep of life on Earth, both biological and cultural.
Chapman’s well-considered analysis of “Gentling a Wildcat” shows that he is
aware of Livingstone’s ecological sensibility. For example:
In ‘Gentling a Wildcat’, then, Livingstone, through the motif of the wildcat,
dramatically renders his humanist concern for creation and destruction in the
pattern of life. Taking full cognizance of the scientific attitude, he admits to his
identification with nature’s cruelty; yet he recognizes too that he is implicated not
simply in a fundamental law of survival, but in the rich inclusiveness of life. By
investing the brute facts of death with emotional significance, he suggests that it is
important for modern ‘scientific’ man to retain his capacity for wonder, and above
all for sympathy. This poem is ultimately a tribute to the imaginative view of
experience. (86-7, my italics)
In her analysis of “Gentling a Wildcat” Narismulu points to the resolving of dislocation:
“the persona reacts instinctively, and humanely (as well as irrationally) in an integrative
spirit of co-operation, offering comfort, sympathy, and synthesis in response to a
situation of conflict, isolation, suffering and destruction” (154). Narisumulu’s comment
contains too many anthropomorphic abstract nouns; it would have been enough to say
‘offering synthesis in response to a situation of suffering and destruction’. (See p 89 for
an ecocritical analysis of this poem which explores the speaker’s anthropomorphism.)
The other poems with an animal motif in this collection include “A Bamboo
Day”, “One Elephant”, and ‘Conversation with a Giraffe at Dusk in the Zoo”. Chapman
claims these “do not present such an unremittingly harsh a view of existence” as do the
animal poems in Sjambok (88). This is true of “One Elephant” (an ironic parody of
human nature) and “Conversation with a Giraffe”. But I would argue that “A Bamboo
Day”, through the image of drought and the predator-prey relationship, strikingly depicts
nature as uncaring and so does hark back to the “harsh view of existence” depicted in
Sjambok. This ambivalent view of nature is maintained by Livingstone in all his work.
In chapter four of his critical study Chapman claims the love poems in A Rosary
of Bone are modelled on 17 th Century English Metaphysical poetry (116), but astutely
adds:
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