Selected Poems 1930-1988 Read online

May Pas, translation of Footfalls (Paris: Minuit).

  August Poèmes, suivi de mirlitonnades (Paris: Minuit).

  1980

  January Compagnie (Paris: Minuit).

  Company (London: Calder).

  May Directs Endgame in London with Rick Cluchey and the San Quentin Drama Workshop.

  1981

  March Mal vu mal dit (Paris: Minuit).

  April Rockaby and Other Short Pieces (New York: Grove).

  October Ill Seen Ill Said, translation of Mal vu mal dit (New York: New Yorker; Grove).

  1983

  April Worstward Ho (London: Calder).

  September Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, containing critical essays on art and literature as well as the unfinished play Human Wishes (London: Calder).

  1984

  February Oversees San Quentin Drama Workshop production of Godot, directed by Walter Asmus, in London.

  Collected Shorter Plays (London: Faber; New York: Grove).

  May Collected Poems 1930–1978 (London: Calder).

  July Collected Shorter Prose 1945–1980 (London: Calder).

  1989

  April Stirrings Still, with illustrations by Louis le Brocquy (New York: Blue Moon Books).

  June Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho, illustrated with etchings by Robert Ryman (New York: Limited Editions Club).

  17 July Death of Suzanne Beckett.

  22 December Death of Samuel Beckett. Burial in Cimetière de Montparnasse.

  *

  1990

  As the Story Was Told: Uncollected and Late Prose (London: Calder; New York: Riverrun Press).

  1992

  Dream of Fair to Middling Women (Dublin: Black Cat Press).

  1995

  Eleutheria (Paris: Minuit).

  1996

  Eleutheria, translated into English by Barbara Wright (London: Faber).

  1998

  No Author Better Served:The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, edited by Maurice Harmon (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press).

  2000

  Beckett on Film: nineteen films, by different directors, of Beckett’s works for the stage (RTÉ, Channel 4, and Irish Film Board; DVD, London: Clarence Pictures).

  2006

  Samuel Beckett:Works for Radio:The Original Broadcasts: five works spanning the period 1957–1976 (CD, London: British Library Board).

  2009

  The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929‒1940, edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

  Compiled by Cassandra Nelson

  Draft of poem from mirlitonnades

  Courtesy of the Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading.

  © The Estate of Samuel Beckett.

  Selected Poems 1930–1989

  Whoroscope

  What’s that?

  An egg?

  By the brothers Boot it stinks fresh.

  Give it to Gillot.

  Galileo how are you

  and his consecutive thirds!

  The vile old Copernican lead-swinging son of a sutler!

  We’re moving he said we’re off – Porca Madonna!

  the way a boatswain would be, or a sack-of-potatoey charging Pretender.

  10

  That’s not moving, that’s moving.

  What’s that?

  A little green fry or a mushroomy one?

  Two lashed ovaries with prostisciutto?

  How long did she womb it, the feathery one?

  Three days and four nights?

  Give it to Gillot.

  Faulhaber, Beeckman and Peter the Red,

  come now in the cloudy avalanche or Gassendi’s sun-red crystally cloud

  and I’ll pebble you all your hen-and-a-half ones

  20

  or I’ll pebble a lens under the quilt in the midst of day.

  To think he was my own brother, Peter the Bruiser,

  and not a syllogism out of him

  no more than if Pa were still in it.

  Hey! pass over those coppers,

  sweet millèd sweat of my burning liver!

  Them were the days I sat in the hot-cupboard throwing Jesuits out of the skylight.

  Who’s that? Hals?

  Let him wait.

  My squinty doaty!

  30

  I hid and you sook.

  And Francine my precious fruit of a house-and-parlour foetus!

  What an exfoliation!

  Her little grey flayed epidermis and scarlet tonsils!

  My one child

  scourged by a fever to stagnant murky blood –

  blood!

  Oh Harvey belovèd

  how shall the red and white, the many in the few,

  (dear bloodswirling Harvey)

  40

  eddy through that cracked beater?

  And the fourth Henry came to the crypt of the arrow.

  What’s that?

  How long?

  Sit on it.

  A wind of evil flung my despair of ease

  against the sharp spires of the one

  lady:

  not once or twice but….

  (Kip of Christ hatch it!)

  50

  in one sun’s drowning

  (Jesuitasters please copy).

  So on with the silk hose over the knitted, and the morbid leather –

  what am I saying! the gentle canvas –

  and away to Ancona on the bright Adriatic,

  and farewell for a space to the yellow key of the Rosicrucians.

  They don’t know what the master of them that do did,

  that the nose is touched by the kiss of all foul and sweet air,

  and the drums, and the throne of the faecal inlet,

  and the eyes by its zig-zags.

  60

  So we drink Him and eat Him

  and the watery Beaune and the stale cubes of Hovis

  because He can jig

  as near or as far from His Jigging Self

  and as sad or lively as the chalice or the tray asks.

  How’s that, Antonio?

  In the name of Bacon will you chicken me up that egg.

  Shall I swallow cave-phantoms?

  Anna Maria!

  She reads Moses and says her love is crucified.

  70

  Leider! Leider! she bloomed and withered,

  a pale abusive parakeet in a mainstreet window.

  No I believe every word of it I assure you.

  Fallor, ergo sum!

  The coy old frôleur!

  He tolle’d and legge’d

  and he buttoned on his redemptorist waistcoat.

  No matter, let it pass.

  I’m a bold boy I know

  so I’m not my son

  80

  (even if I were a concierge)

  nor Joachim my father’s

  but the chip of a perfect block that’s neither old nor new,

  the lonely petal of a great high bright rose.

  Are you ripe at last,

  my slim pale double-breasted turd?

  How rich she smells,

  this abortion of a fledgling!

  I will eat it with a fish fork.

  White and yolk and feathers.

  Then I will rise and move moving 90

  toward Rahab of the snows,

  the murdering matinal pope-confessed amazon,

  Christina the ripper.

  Oh Weulles spare the blood of a Frank

  who has climbed the bitter steps,

  (René du Perron …!)

  and grant me my second

  starless inscrutable hour.

  Notes

  René Descartes, Seigneur du Perron, liked his omelette made of eggs hatched from eight to ten days; shorter or longer under the hen and the result, he says, is disgusting.

  He kept his own birthday to himself so that no astrologer could cast his nativity.

>   The shuttle of a ripening egg combs the warp of his days.

  3 In 1640 the brothers Boot refuted Aristotle in Dublin.

  4 Descartes passed on the easier problems in analytical geometry to his valet Gillot.

  5–10 Refer to his contempt for Galileo Jr., (whom he confused with the more musical Galileo Sr.), and to his expedient sophistry concerning the movement of the earth.

  17 He solved problems submitted by these mathematicians.

  21–26 The attempt at swindling on the part of his elder brother Pierre de la Bretaillière – The money he received as a soldier.

  27 Franz Hals.

  29–30 As a child he played with a little cross-eyed girl.

  31–35 His daughter died of scarlet fever at the age of six.

  37–40 Honoured Harvey for his discovery of the circulation of the blood, but would not admit that he had explained the motion of the heart.

  41 The heart of Henri IV was received at the Jesuit college of La Flèche while Descartes was still a student there.

  45–53 His visions and pilgrimage to Loretto.

  56–65 His Eucharistic sophistry, in reply to the Jansenist Antoine Arnauld, who challenged him to reconcile his doctrine of matter with the doctrine of transubstantiation.

  68 Schurmann, the Dutch blue-stocking, a pious pupil of Voët, the adversary of Descartes.

  73–76 Saint Augustine has a revelation in the shrubbery and reads Saint Paul.

  77–83 He proves God by exhaustion.

  91–93 Christina, Queen of Sweden. At Stockholm, in November, she required Descartes, who had remained in bed till midday all his life, to be with her at five o’clock in the morning.

  94 Weulles, a Peripatetic Dutch physician at the Swedish court, and an enemy of Descartes.

  Gnome

  Spend the years of learning squandering

  Courage for the years of wandering

  Through a world politely turning

  From the loutishness of learning.

  Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates

  The Vulture

  dragging his hunger through the sky

  of my skull shell of sky and earth

  stooping to the prone who must

  soon take up their life and walk

  mocked by a tissue that may not serve

  till hunger earth and sky be offal

  Enueg I

  Exeo in a spasm

  tired of my darling’s red sputum

  from the Portobello Private Nursing Home

  its secret things

  and toil to the crest of the surge of the steep perilous bridge

  and lapse down blankly under the scream of the hoarding

  round the bright stiff banner of the hoarding

  into a black west

  throttled with clouds.

  Above the mansions the algum-trees

  the mountains

  my skull sullenly

  clot of anger

  skewered aloft strangled in the cang of the wind

  bites like a dog against its chastisement.

  I trundle along rapidly now on my ruined feet

  flush with the livid canal;

  at Parnell Bridge a dying barge

  carrying a cargo of nails and timber

  rocks itself softly in the foaming cloister of the lock;

  on the far bank a gang of down and outs would seem to be mending a beam.

  Then for miles only wind

  and the weals creeping alongside on the water

  and the world opening up to the south

  across a travesty of champaign to the mountains

  and the stillborn evening turning a filthy green

  manuring the night fungus

  and the mind annulled

  wrecked in wind.

  I splashed past a little wearish old man,

  Democritus,

  scuttling along between a crutch and a stick,

  his stump caught up horribly, like a claw, under his breech, smoking.

  Then because a field on the left went up in a sudden blaze

  of shouting and urgent whistling and scarlet and blue ganzies

  I stopped and climbed the bank to see the game.

  A child fidgeting at the gate called up:

  ‘Would we be let in Mister?’

  ‘Certainly’ I said ‘you would.’

  But, afraid, he set off down the road.

  ‘Well’ I called after him ‘why wouldn’t you go on in?’

  ‘Oh’ he said, knowingly,

  ‘I was in that field before and I got put out.’

  So on,

  derelict,

  as from a bush of gorse on fire in the mountain after dark,

  or in Sumatra the jungle hymen,

  the still flagrant rafflesia.

  Next:

  a lamentable family of grey verminous hens,

  perishing out in the sunk field,

  trembling, half asleep, against the closed door of a shed,

  with no means of roosting.

  The great mushy toadstool,

  green-black,

  oozing up after me,

  soaking up the tattered sky like an ink of pestilence,

  in my skull the wind going fetid,

  the water …

  Next:

  on the hill down from the Fox and Geese into Chapelizod

  a small malevolent goat, exiled on the road,

  remotely pucking the gate of his field;

  the Isolde Stores a great perturbation of sweaty heroes,

  in their Sunday best,

  come hastening down for a pint of nepenthe or moly or half and half

  from watching the hurlers above in Kilmainham.

  Blotches of doomed yellow in the pit of the Liffey;

  the fingers of the ladders hooked over the parapet,

  soliciting;

  a slush of vigilant gulls in the grey spew of the sewer.

  Ah the banner

  the banner of meat bleeding

  on the silk of the seas and the arctic flowers

  that do not exist.

  Enueg II

  world world world world

  and the face grave

  cloud against the evening

  de morituris nihil nisi

  and the face crumbling shyly

  too late to darken the sky

  blushing away into the evening

  shuddering away like a gaffe

  veronica mundi

  veronica munda

  gives us a wipe for the love of Jesus

  sweating like Judas

  tired of dying

  tired of policemen

  feet in marmalade

  perspiring profusely

  heart in marmalade

  smoke more fruit

  the old heart the old heart

  breaking outside congress

  doch I assure thee

  lying on O’Connell Bridge

  goggling at the tulips of the evening

  the green tulips

  shining round the corner like an anthrax

  shining on Guinness’s barges

  the overtone the face

  too late to brighten the sky

  doch doch I assure thee

  Alba

  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

  grave suave singing silk

  stoop to the black firmament of areca

  rain on the bamboos flower of smoke alley of willows

  who though you stoop with fingers of compassion

  to endorse the dust

  shall not add to your bounty

  whose beauty shall be a sheet before me

  a statement of itself drawn across the tempest of emblems

  so that there is no sun and no unveiling

  and
no host

  only I and then the sheet

  and bulk dead

  Dortmunder

  In the magic the Homer dusk

  past the red spire of sanctuary

  I null she royal hulk

  hasten to the violet lamp to the thin K’in music of the bawd.

  She stands before me in the bright stall

  sustaining the jade splinters

  the scarred signaculum of purity quiet

  the eyes the eyes black till the plagal east

  shall resolve the long night phrase.

  Then, as a scroll, folded,

  and the glory of her dissolution enlarged

  in me, Habbakuk, mard of all sinners.

  Schopenhauer is dead, the bawd

  puts her lute away.

  Sanies I

  all the livelong way this day of sweet showers from Portrane on the seashore

  Donabate sad swans of Turvey Swords

  pounding along in three ratios like a sonata

  like a Ritter with pommelled scrotum atra cura on the step

  Botticelli from the fork down pestling the transmission

  tires bleeding voiding zeep the highway

  all heaven in the sphincter

  the sphincter

  müüüüüüüde now

  potwalloping now through the promenaders

  this trusty all-steel this super-real

  bound for home like a good boy

  where I was born with a pop with the green of the larches

  ah to be back in the caul now with no trusts

  no fingers no spoilt love

  belting along in the meantime clutching the bike

  the billows of the nubile the cere wrack