Selected Poems 1930-1988 Page 3
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