"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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poem, indicates that overcoming this repression of the primordial or chthonian element
is not without its pitfalls. Raw Dionysian passion is too much to bear.
In ecological terms, this poem displays a coming together of the biological and
the cultural. The biological is signified through the anatomy of the players, and the
cultural through their music, which becomes “new blues” or songs different from the
ancient tunes which were used to hymn the earth. This power of art resurfaces as a theme
in A Littoral Zone.
In “Gentling a Wildcat” (EC 18) 22 and “A Piece of Earth” (AU 47) Livingstone
imagines and anthropomorphises the plight of mauled animals. In both poems
Livingstone communicates an unsentimental compassion for the suffering animals, but
shows himself to be powerless against nature’s apparently cruel tide. The wildcat is
savaged by a predator while the blue duiker in “A Piece of Earth” is caught in a human
trap set by a “footloose poacher” (line 14). Nature’s cruelty is juxtaposed with human
cruelty in the latter poem. While Livingstone as speaker is active in “Gentling a Wildcat”,
he is notably absent in the second poem where the Earth, too, “remains unmoving” (line
24). Yet both poems powerfully convey the poet’s communion with the doomed animals
and, by extrapolation, with nature itself. “A Piece of Earth” evokes an antipathy towards
human callousness, for the poacher does not bother to check his trap, is “long gone” and
“will not be returning” (lines 13 and 16). This poem is not so much an indictment on
poaching as on the poacher’s lack of moral sensibility. Livingstone’s anthropomorphic
communion with a part of nature is juxtaposed with the trapper’s blatant indifference.
“Gentling a Wildcat” is obversely ecological in that to tame or gentle a frenzied
wildcat in its death throes shows Livingstone’s remarkable, almost unbelievable,
atunement with nature. But his act is an exception and makes no difference to the broader
ecological picture. Or does it? This particular wildcat and her cub are long gone, but the
poem and its message live on. The message is difficult to pinpoint. We, as readers, are
not called to gentle dying wildcats, but we are called to appreciate and revere nature’s
cycles. The ecological nub of the poem lies in stanza eight. What is the “something” that
“felt wrong” (line 36)? It is that birth and death should not occur simultaneously because
this goes against nature’s grain. Nature’s “ lifetimes of claws, kaleidoscopes: / moon-
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No other poems in Eyes Closed Against the Sun appear to deal with the theme of humankind as part of
nature.