Selected Poems 1930-1988 Read online

  SAMUEL BECKETT

  Selected Poems 1930–1989

  Edited by David Wheatley

  Contents

  Title Page

  Preface

  Table of Dates

  [Note: Echo’s Bones was Beckett’s only separately published collection of poems, but as the French poems of the 1930s and 1940s and the mirlitonnades all form sequences in their own right, all three are marked as such in the Contents.]

  Whoroscope

  Gnome

  Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates (1935)

  The Vulture

  Enueg I

  Enueg II

  Alba

  Dortmunder

  Sanies I

  Sanies II

  Serena I

  Serena II

  Serena III

  Malacoda

  Da Tagte Es

  Echo’s Bones

  Yoke of Liberty

  Antipepsis

  Cascando

  Ooftish

  [Poems in French, 1937–1939]

  ‘elles viennent’ / ‘they come’

  ‘être là sans mâchoires sans dents’

  Ascension

  La Mouche

  ‘ainsi a-t-on beau’

  Dieppe / Dieppe

  Rue de Vaugirard

  Arènes de Lutèce

  Saint-Lô

  [Poems in French, 1947–1949]

  ‘bon bon il est un pays’

  Mort de A.D.

  ‘vive morte ma seule saison’

  ‘je suis ce cours de sable qui glisse’ / ‘my way is in the sand flowing’

  ‘que ferais-je sans ce monde’ / ‘what would I do without this world’

  ‘je voudrais que mon amour meure’ / ‘I would like my love to die’

  Song (‘Age is when to a man’)

  ‘hors crâne seul dedans’ / Something there

  dread nay

  Roundelay

  mirlitonnades (1978)

  en face

  rentrer

  somme toute

  fin fond du néant

  silence tel que ce qui fut

  écoute-les

  lueurs lisières

  imagine si ceci

  d’abord

  flux cause

  samedi répit

  chaque jour envie

  nuit qui fais tant

  rien nul

  à peine à bien mené

  ce qu’ont les yeux

  ce qu’a de pis

  ne manquez pas à Tanger

  plus loin un autre commémore

  ne manquez pas à Stuttgart

  vieil aller

  fous qui disiez

  pas à pas

  rêve

  morte parmi

  d’où

  mots survivants

  fleuves et océans

  de pied ferme

  sitôt sorti de l’ermitage

  à l’instant de s’entendre dire

  la nuit venue où l’âme allait

  pas davantage

  son ombre une nuit

  noire soeur

  le nain nonagénaire

  à bout de songes un bouquin

  ‘one dead of night’

  ‘there’

  ‘again gone’

  ‘bail bail’

  Là

  ‘Go where never before’

  Brief Dream

  Comment dire / what is the word

  [Translations by Samuel Beckett of poems by others]

  Eugenio Montale: Delta / Delta

  Ernst Moerman: Armstrong / Louis Armstrong

  Arthur Rimbaud: Le Bateau ivre / Drunken Boat

  Paul Éluard: L’amoureuse / Lady Love

  Paul Éluard: A perte de vue dans le sens de mon corps / Out of Sight in the Direction of My Body

  Guillaume Apollinaire: Zone / Zone

  Sébastien Chamfort: Huit Maximes / Long after Chamfort

  Tailpiece (‘who may tell the tale’)

  Appendix: translations of Beckett’s untranslated French poems

  Notes

  About the Author

  About the Editor

  Titles in the Samuel Beckett series

  Copyright

  Preface

  Samuel Beckett began and ended his career with poetry. From Whoroscope (1930) to ‘what is the word’ (1989) is a lifetime’s arc of writing. It was as a poet that the young Beckett launched himself in the little reviews of 1930s Paris, and as a poet that he would make his first breakthrough into writing in French. From the outset poetry was central to Beckett’s work, from the abject majesty of the Leopardi epigraph to his book on Proust (‘E fango è il mondo’; ‘and the world is mud’) to his lifelong engagement with Dante, Racine, Keats, Hölderlin and other favourites. ‘The poem of poems’, Beckett wrote in ‘Recent Irish Poetry’, ‘would embrace the sense of confinement, the getaway, the vicissitudes of the road, the wan bliss on the rim’, and even allowing for the critical tone here (Beckett is deprecating his Irish contemporaries), an oscillation between contrary states is a defining condition of his own work too. Beckett the poet alternates between expansiveness and concision, slapstick humour and Zen-like calm, claustrophobic trampings round Dublin and moments of blissful centrifugal escape. Escape not just from Ireland but the larger Anglosphere was a deeply felt need: Beckett translated Rimbaud, Éluard and Apollinaire and served his time in the trench wars of Irish poetic modernism, forswearing Yeats but embracing neither Eliot’s Christianity nor the emerging idiolect of Auden, MacNeice and Spender. ‘Keep on the move,’ Beckett writes at the end of ‘Serena III’, and it was a stylistic principle to which his poetry would cleave assiduously. Though his ambitions quickly overspilled any one genre, Beckett’s plays and fiction are also full of poetry, from the polyglot doodles of Dream of Fair to Middling Women and the nonsense rhymes of Watt to Hamm’s intoning of Baudelaire in Endgame and the dramatised versification of Words and Music. Beckett’s work as a whole has never wanted for exegetes, but the poems remain a somewhat mandarin interest, attracting a band of advocates that has nevertheless included Michael Hamburger, Thomas Kinsella and Derek Mahon, while among composers György Kurtág, Morton Feldman and Marcel Mihalovici have all responded with musical settings.

  Traditionally the Incipit of the Beckett canon, ‘Whoroscope’ was composed in 1930 as a last-minute entry for a poetry competition on the subject of time. The poem is spoken by Descartes, who has been employed by Queen Christina of Sweden to teach her philosophy; unfortunately for him, as a lifelong late riser, the classes are at dawn. Hence perhaps the abandonment of cool reasoning on the mind-body divide for the absurdist theatrics of Descartes sitting in the hot-cupboard ‘throwing Jesuits out of the skylight’. The notes Beckett appends to the poem exploit the new-found freedoms of The Waste Land while simultaneously sidestepping Eliotian solemnity (‘In 1640 the brothers Boot refuted Aristotle in Dublin’). A reference to Augustine proving God ‘by exhaustion’ provides an early example of ‘the loutishness of learning’ (in the words of ‘Gnome’), contorting the unobliging universe into patterns of reasonableness and sense. Derek Mahon, otherwise one of Beckett’s strongest admirers, finds the poem’s parade of learning altogether too loutish. However, if ‘Whoroscope’ must finally be judged (in its own words) the ‘abortion of a fledgling’, it sets a tone of what Murphy calls ‘eleutheromania’, or rage for freedom, that Beckett will follow in his later poems and their more successful puncturing of the embryos of callow youth.

  The young Beckett’s keenness to emulate Joyce extended to wearing the tight-fitting, pigeon-toed shoes favoured by the older man; and to contemplate the punning style of ‘Home Olga’, an acrostic tribute to Joyce not included here, is to w
itness Beckett shoehorn himself into a style patently not his. The juvenilia published by Beckett in the 1930s secrete allusions like cuttlefish ink, behind which lurks a spluttering and inchoate poetic ego. The baroque glory of titles such as ‘From the Only Poet to a Shining Whore’ and ‘Casket of Pralinen for a Daughter of a Dissipated Mandarin’ is among the most striking things about these poems, which are probably best read in tandem with the exhaustive commentaries in Lawrence Harvey’s 1970 study, Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic.

  A striking albeit exiled exception among the juvenilia is ‘Yoke of Liberty’ (originally ‘Moly’), whose ceremonial vocabulary (‘torn’, ‘grave’, ‘watchful’, ‘pitiful’) links it to ‘Alba’ and ‘Dortmunder’ which were included in Echo’s Bones, published in 1935 by George Reavey’s Europa Press in Paris. From the biblical exhortation to ‘the prone’ in the opening poem, ‘The Vulture’, that they ‘take up their life and walk’, the volume’s thirteen poems embark on a variety of journeys that, variously, go nowhere or reveal themselves as preludes to the funeral procession of ‘Malacoda’, written in deep grief for Beckett’s father, who died in 1933 (‘all aboard all souls / half-mast aye aye / nay’). While Beckett refused to authorise a reprint of More Pricks than Kicks until 1970, he was happy in later life to keep the poems of Echo’s Bones in print; to Hugh Kenner, they seemed the only part of his early work for which Beckett still cared. At the time, though, the book passed almost without notice: ‘five lines of faint damn in Dublin Mag’, as Beckett lamented to Thomas MacGreevy, with the added insult that many of Beckett’s friends, already familiar with the poems, refused to buy copies. ‘Getting known’, as Krapp declared, contemplating his ‘seventeen copies sold’.

  Beckett’s hopes for Echo’s Bones must have extended beyond a favourable review in the Dublin Magazine, but despite resigning from his teaching post at Trinity he still found himself, in the mid-1930s, more embroiled in Dublin literary life than can have been comfortable. His prose had so far failed to put the necessary distance between him and the hated littérateurs of Dublin pub life: Dream of Fair to Middling Women had been abandoned, More Pricks Than Kicks banned, and Murphy would endure dozens of rejections before its publication in 1938. The inducements to a little local score-settling were strong, and in ‘Recent Irish Poetry’, writing as ‘Andrew Belis’, Beckett launched a rollicking denunciation of his contemporaries. His prime targets are the ‘antiquarians’ still wedded to Gaelic revivalism in the age of modernist ‘rupture of the lines of communication’. These include F. R. Higgins and Austin Clarke, soon to be pilloried as the hapless ‘Austin Ticklepenny’ of Murphy. The young Beckett was not one for nuance on the subject of Ireland and Irish poetry in the 1930s, and kept his raids on mythology studiously free of the Celtic ‘fully licensed stock-in-trade’ beloved of Higgins and Clarke. Though always an admirer of Jack Yeats, as both painter and novelist, Beckett also resisted the poetry of W. B. Yeats; evidence of his belated conversion to its merits can be found in Anne Atik’s memoir How It Was.

  The unpublished essay ‘Censorship in the Saorstat’ links Irish anti-intellectualism and sexual Puritanism. Sex is everywhere and nowhere in 1930s Ireland: writing to MacGreevy in 1931 Beckett complains of Seumas O’Sullivan sizing up his submissions to the Dublin Magazine for obscene anagrams. Erotic thoughts in the early poems lead to wallowing abjection (‘girls taken strippin that’s the idea’) or hopeless sublimation. ‘Sanies II’ remembers Becky Cooper’s brothel in Dublin’s Railway Street (whither Belacqua makes his way at the end of the short story ‘Ding-Dong’); the print of Henry Holiday’s ‘Dante and Beatrice’ on the wall shows what fertile ground the Beckett narrator finds in these ‘sites of rendezvous’ for the Madonna-whore complex expounded in Dream of Fair to Middling Women. The French title used for a 1967 gathering of short prose, Têtes-mortes, refers to the leftovers from a process of alchemical sublimation, and in ‘Alba’ an ethereal woman bestows her grace from on high but utterly fails to ennoble the base metal of the Beckettian ego, or raise him up to her level. Where other poems from Echo’s Bones rage hysterically against this impasse, ‘Alba’ achieves an oriental calm, with its lute music, silk and bamboo, suggesting careful study of Pound’s ‘Cathay’ and the contemporary translations of Arthur Waley:

  before morning you shall be here

  and Dante and the Logos and all strata and mysteries

  and the branded moon

  beyond the white plane of music

  that you shall establish here before morning

  Several of the poems of Echo’s Bones adopt Provençal titles: a ‘Serena’ is a lover’s song of anticipation, sung at evening, and the ‘Alba’ the song of the departing lover at dawn; ‘Enueg’ is the Provençal for ‘ennui’. Another gnomic title, ‘Sanies’, refers to a seropurulent discharge, and not without reason; Beckett’s medical history for this period is one long catalogue of skin complaints, as though even at an epidermal level integration into his Irish surroundings was beyond him. The walker of ‘Enueg I’ launches into his trek round Dublin ‘in a spasm’, proceeding by a series of cinematic jump-cut transitions that remind us of Beckett’s ambition in the mid-1930s to study with Eisenstein in Moscow. ‘Enueg I’ alternates between social realism and incantation, keen as ever to bundle the self offstage (‘the mind annulled /wrecked in wind’), and ending with a quatrain transplanted from Rimbaud’s ‘Barbare’. A long poem of MacGreevy’s from this period, ‘Crón Tráth na nDéithe’ (the Gaelic, roughly, for Götterdämmerung), employs similar tactics of modernist collage and fragmentation, but predicated on an investment in Irish nationalism which is simply lacking in Beckett, for all the rediscovery in recent decades of his previously undervalued Irishness. The poems of Echo’s Bones are intensely claustrophobic, but while their Irish locales may appear inescapable (just as leaving the city is physically beyond the denizens of Joyce’s Dubliners), their truest home remains ‘unspeakable’, in the formulation of the late text ‘neither’. The urban peripatetics of Mercier and Camier and the post-war novellas, not to mention his kinship with Apollinaire’s ‘Zone’, have their self-shredding roots in poems such as ‘Sanies I’.

  Robert Lowell found that John Berryman’s work operated in a spin-cycle of ‘prayer’ and ‘riot’, and Beckett’s critical pronouncements offer some perspective on his own wavering between the meditative and the unruly. Of Thomas MacGreevy he wrote in 1934: ‘All poetry, as discriminated from the various paradigms of prosody, is prayer.’ A review of Denis Devlin four years later makes the obscurantist counter-argument, advancing ‘the vile suggestion that art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear’. Beckett’s poems in English after Echo’s Bones continue to thrive on authorial quarrels with the self, from the fulminating blasphemies of ‘Ooftish’ to the lovelorn cries of ‘Cascando’. While the God the Father figure of ‘Ooftish’ greedily feeds on human suffering (‘we’ll make use of it /we’ll make sense of it’), the disappointed lover of ‘Cascando’ looks to non-existence instead (‘is it not better abort than be barren’). Neither poem uses any punctuation, so when ‘Cascando’ ponders ‘last times […] /of knowing not knowing pretending’, it is tempting to hear ‘not knowing’ as the Zen-like object of ‘knowing’, and of the wise passivity towards which Beckett’s poetry increasingly gravitates.

  1937 saw Beckett make his permanent home in Paris and begin to compose in French, in a sequence of twelve poems published after the war in Les Temps modernes. His usual practice after his adoption of French was to produce versions of new texts in both French and English, sometimes, as with Mercier and Camier, allowing decades to elapse before completing the task. His poetry is anomalous in this regard, as the bulk of his poems exist in only English or French. In the case of poems such as ‘they come’/‘elles viennent’, it is not immediately apparent which, if either, of the two texts should be thought of as the original and which the translation. Depending on one’s preference, Beckett has written one poem twice or tw
o poems once. The Spanish edition of Beckett’s poems responds to this by translating ‘they come’ and ‘elles viennent’ separately, enacting the poem’s theme in a trilingual constellation of sameness and difference.

  Esse est percipi, to be is to be perceived, according to Bishop Berkeley but the roles of observer and observed shift constantly in these poems, along with the limits of the unitary self that might underwrite them (‘everything divides into itself’, as Beckett writes in Malone Dies). A reference to Immanuel Kant contemplating the Lisbon earthquake suggests the seismic upsets Beckett has set himself to absorb, and it is hardly a coincidence that many of these poems end with an image of flight from upheaval and violence. ‘Saint-Lô’ vibrates to the echoes of a more recent catastrophe, commemorating Beckett’s work with the Red Cross in that devastated Normandy town after the war and watching ‘the old mind ghost-forsaken /sink into its havoc’. If the self fragments in ‘Arènes de Lutèce’, in ‘Rue de Vaugirard’ he isolates a fugitive moment in time before peeling the self away from it like a photographic negative (‘un négatif irrécusable’). Beckett does something similar in the lovely quatrain ‘Dieppe’, which he skims intertextually from Hölderlin’s ‘Der Spaziergang’.

  The Unnamable, in the novel of that name, comes to believe that he is a tympanum, ‘the thing that divides the world in two’, and increasingly the French poems master the turmoil of the earlier work by reaching for a state of quietist in-betweenness:

  my way is in the sand flowing

  between the shingle and the dune

  the summer rain rains on my life

  on me my life harrying fleeing

  to its beginning to its end

  The end is in the beginning and yet we go on, though after the mainly French poems of the 1940s Beckett took an extended hiatus from poetry, even if his fiction and plays continued to feature poems (e.g. ‘Song’, from Words and Music). It is a notable feature of Beckett’s later work that his fiction and drama begin to take on each other’s characteristics (the stage-direction-style arrangement of the bodies in The Lost Ones and Imagination Dead Imagine, the fiction-like A Piece of Monologue, the appropriately named ‘neither’, written as an opera libretto), and by the time we reach his last poems we are dealing with texts that could be in any, or all of his genres.