Selected Poems 1930-1988 Read online

  Rue de Vaugirard

  halfway along / I release the button and beaming with candour / expose the plate to the light and shadow / then set off again fortified / by an unimpeachable negative

  Lutetian Amphitheatre

  From where we are sitting above the tiers / I see us enter from the rue des Arènes side, / hesitate, look up in the air, then heavily / come towards us across the dark sand, / uglier and uglier, as ugly as the others, / but mute. A little green dog / enters running from the rue Monge side, / she stops, she follows him with her eyes, / he crosses the arena, he disappears / behind the pedestal of the savant Gabriel de Mortillet. / She turns back, I have left, I climb the rustic steps / alone, I touch with my left hand / the rustic ramp, it’s made of concrete. She hesitates, / takes a step towards the rue Monge exit, then follows me. / I shiver, it is myself I rejoin, / it is with other eyes that I now look / at the sand, the puddles under the drizzle, / a little girl trailing a hoop behind her, / a couple, lovers perhaps, hand in hand, / the empty tiers, the tall houses, the sky / that shines on us too late. / I turn around, amazed / to find his sad face there.

  So what if there is a land

  So what if there is a land / where forgetfulness where forgetfulness weighs / sweetly on the unnamed worlds / there the head is silenced the head is mute / and you know no you know nothing / the song of dead mouths dies / on the shore it ends its journey / there is no cause to mourn // my solitude I know it ok I know it badly / I’ve got time I tell myself I’ve got time / but what weather famished bone filthy weather / a sky forever growing paler my grain of sky / the ray that climbs ocellate trembling / the microns of dark years // you want me to go from A to B I cannot / I cannot come out I am in a trackless land / yes yes it’s a fine thing you have there a very fine thing / what is that ask me no more questions / spiral dust of instants what is this the same / calm love hate calm calm

  Death of A.D.

  and there to be there still there / pressed against my old poxed plank of dark / days and nights blindly crushed / to be there and not fleeing fleeing and being there / bent towards the confession of time dying / of having been what it was done what it did / to me to my friend dead yesterday gleaming eye / long teeth panting in his beard devouring / the lives of the saints a life per day of life / reliving its black sins at night / dead yesterday while I lived / and to be there drinking above the storm / the burden of irremissible time / clutching the old wood witness to departures / witness to returns

  long live dead my only season

  long live dead my only season / white lilies chrysanthemums / lively nests abandoned / mud of April leaves / fine grey days of frost

  mirlitonnades

  facing / the worst / laugh / till you burst

  *

  back home / at night / on with the light // extinguish see / the night see / pressed to the window / the face

  *

  all said and done / game over amounts / to a quarter billion / quarter hours gone / not including / extra time

  *

  far end of void / after what watch / eye thought it saw / the head feebly stir / calmed him saying / all in the head

  *

  silence such that what / once was will never again / be torn by the murmur / of a word with no past / helpless not to say too much / just saying I’ll go on

  *

  listen to them / add up / words / upon words / without a word / step / upon step / one by / one

  *

  flashes edgings / of the shuttle / take more than a step fade / about-turn shine like new // halt rather / far from each / by your self selfless / out of their reach

  *

  surmise if this / should one day this / one fine day / surmise / if one day / one fine day this / should cease / surmise

  *

  first off / flat on the rough / right / or left / no matter // then / flat on the right / or the left / the left / or the right // at last / flat on the left / or the right / no matter / on the lot / the head

  *

  flux the cause / that each thing / busy being / each thing / say this here / this here even / busy being / is busy not / talk about it

  *

  saturday respite / no more laughter / from midnight / to midnight / and no tears after

  *

  each day the desire / one day to be alive / not of course without scorn / for one day having been born

  *

  night which makes / us pray for dawn / night of grace / come down

  *

  nothing no one / will have been / in vain / so long as / nothing no one / been

  *

  best foot no sooner forward / for the last step / than rests waiting / as custom dictates / for the other do likewise / as custom dictates / and so bears the burden / further on / as custom dictates / thus far at least

  *

  whatever good / ill seen by the eyes / the thread tired / hands have dropped / hold on tight / fingers and eyes / the good comes back / as better

  *

  whatever ill / the heart has known / whatever curses / the head rained down / on itself / recall / the worst comes back / as worse

  *

  don’t miss when in Tangier / the Saint-André graveyard where / under stone the dead are laid / itself by flowers buried / a seat to honour / Arthur Keyser / with him in spirit who / sits a while up here below

  *

  further on one marks where / Caroline Hay Taylor lies / to her belief stayed true / that hope must spring from life / departed Ireland for paradise / in August nineteen thirty-two

  *

  don’t miss when in Stuttgart / the long rue Neckar / the call of the void / not itself any more / so strong is the feeling / you’ve been here before

  *

  old going / old halts // going / absent / absent / halt

  *

  fools who said / never again / quick / say it again

  *

  step by step / nowhere / none alone / knows how / little steps / nowhere / stubbornly

  *

  dream / without cease / nor ever / peace

  *

  dead among / her dead flies / the spider rocked / by a gentle breeze

  *

  whence / the voice that says / live // another life

  *

  words that survive / life / keep him company / still a while

  *

  rivers and oceans / left him for living / at the Courtablon burn / near the Mare-Chaudron

  *

  resolutely / past all care / passes himself out / going nowhere

  *

  venturing from his hermit’s refuge / it was the calm after the deluge

  *

  no sooner heard himself unleash / the words all over than / his life at last began to flash / its toothy grin at him

  *

  the night come when at last / his soul was to be repossessed / incontinent buffoon / he let it go an hour too soon

  *

  no more / memories all told than aged / one day in April / one day old

  *

  his shadow one night / came in from the cold / lengthened turned white / dissolved

  *

  dark sister / who art in hell / laying about you / everywhere / what are you waiting for

  *

  the final murmur / of a dwarf in his ninetieth year / grant me for pity / a full-sized bier

  *

  all out of dreams a buckhare / tired of the hunt constrained / to quit its den made sure to leave / the candlestick behind

  NOTES

  ‘Whoroscope’. First published by Nancy Cunard’s Hours Press in Paris, 1930. Beckett’s notes, like Eliot’s to The Waste Land, were added at his publisher’s request, and draw on his reading of Baillet’s La vie de Monsieur Descartes and John Pentland Mahaffy’s Descartes (1880).

  ‘Gnome’. Written after Beckett’s resignation and flight from Trinity College, Dublin in January 1932; first published Dublin Magazine July–September 1934. The title connects the
Greek ‘gnosis’ (knowledge) with the idea of a diminished being. According to Beckett, the poem was inspired by Goethe’s ‘Xenien’ (Xenia: gifts to the departing). Originally, and until 1977, ‘a’ in l. 3 read ‘the’.

  ‘The Vulture’. First published in Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates (1935). Beckett acknowledged a debt to Goethe’s ‘Harzreise im Winter’.

  ‘Enueg I’. Echo’s Bones. The ‘enueg’ (= ennui) is a Provençal genre of stylised complaint. The Dublin suburb Chapelizod is the setting for Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and is celebrated in myth as the burial place of Iseult of Ireland. Nepenthe is a drug of forgetfulness, and moly a herb used by Odysseus as a charm against Circe’s enchantments. The concluding four lines derive from Rimbaud’s ‘Barbare’.

  ‘Enueg II’. Echo’s Bones. Veronica mopped Christ’s brow with a sudarium: ‘veronica mundi’ is a Veronica ‘of the world’, and ‘veronica munda’ a ‘pure’ Veronica. Deirdre Bair describes Beckett storming out of painter Sean O’Sullivan’s studio, decrying another artist as ‘a Veronicist who would wipe the face of Christ with a sanitary towel’. The German ‘doch’ is used to contradict a negative statement; in Beckett’s notebooks for the abandoned play Human Wishes, the phrase ‘Dr J in love’ is annotated ‘Doch’ in the margin, while elsewhere Beckett notes Johnson’s habit of saying ‘No, sir’ when he wished to express agreement. ‘Feet in marmalade’ derives from an expression of Beckett’s friend Georges Pelorson’s grandmother.

  ‘Alba’. Dublin Magazine VI October–December 1931, then Echo’s Bones. A Provençal song of the dawn, lamenting the separation of the poet from the beloved. The areca is an Asian palm tree.

  ‘Dortmunder’. Echo’s Bones. The title refers to a German beer. A plagal, unlike a perfect cadence, offers no resolution from leading note to tonic. The k’în is a Chinese lute. Habakkuk (sic) is unique among biblical prophets for openly questioning the ways of God.

  ‘Sanies I’. Echo’s Bones. A sanies is a seropurulent discharge from an infection. Portrane, in north Co. Dublin, features in the short story ‘Fingal’, where Jonathan Swift is described as having imprisoned his ‘motte’ (girlfriend) there. A potwalloper is one who claimed a vote on the basis on having boiled (walloped) a kettle in the parish for six consecutive months; with its franchise vested in ‘potwallopers’, Swords was historically one of the few free (though notoriously corrupt) boroughs in Ireland, its name recalling another Latin word for filth, sordes. Holles Street: site of a Dublin maternity hospital.

  ‘Sanies II’. Echo’s Bones. Gracieuse, Percinet and Belle-Belle are characters from the Comtesse d’Aulnoy’s fairy tales. The Latin line (from Plautus) means ‘dead bullocks strike against living women’. The closing fantasy of flagellation prompts thoughts of the Dublin madam Becky Cooper, whose establishment featured a reproduction of Henry Holiday’s ‘Dante and Beatrice’.

  ‘Serena I.’ Echo’s Bones. A Provençal song of evening, longing for night, and for the beloved. A version of the poem sent to Thomas MacGreevy with a letter of 8 October 1932 features an additional opening stanza. Pietro Aretino and Daniel Defoe both castigated urban decadence. Wren’s ‘giant bully’ is Sir Christopher Wren’s memorial to the victims of the great fire of 1666.

  ‘Serena II’. Echo’s Bones. The poet’s Kerry Blue bitch revisits the Irish west coast in a dream before whelping in a bog. Croagh Patrick is a site of pilgrimage in Co. Mayo.

  ‘Serena III’. Echo’s Bones. ‘Pothook of beauty’: William Hogarth espoused the sigmoid line, as encountered by the poet in the decorations of the Merrion Flats. Misery Hill was once a leper colony and site of public executions.

  ‘Malacoda’. Echo’s Bones. Malacoda is among the devils in Inferno XX who threaten Dante and Virgil, and breaks wind at them. His latter-day incarnation, an undertaker kneeling by the coffin of the poet’s father, is similarly flatulent. A Jan van Huysum painting in the National Gallery, London, features a butterfly (the ‘imago’ ‘on the box’).

  ‘Da Tagte Es’. Echo’s Bones. The title may derive from the minnesinger Walther von der Vogelweide’s ‘dô taget ez und muos ich waken’ (‘it dawns and I must waken’), though Beckett’s notes suggest Heinrich von Morungen as another possible source.

  ‘Echo’s Bones’. Echo’s Bones. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Echo mourns for the dead Narcissus and wastes away to stone. ‘Gantelope’ is an archaic form of ‘gauntlet’ (running the gauntlet), which contains the after-image of an antelope. ‘Yoke of Liberty’. European Caravan, part 1 (New York, 1931). Originally ‘Moly’.

  ‘Antipepsis’. Metre 3 Autumn 1997. Possibly written in response to the banning of More Pricks Than Kicks in Ireland (1934), despite the handwritten addition ‘After Saint Lô 1946’ (Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading [UoR] typescript). ‘Ochone’ is a Gaelic term of lament. L.8 originally ‘The ass was the more intelligent’, ‘ass’ crossed out and amended to ‘cart’.

  ‘Cascando’. Composed 1936; first published Dublin Magazine XI October–December 1936. A musical term denoting decreased volume and a slower tempo.

  ‘Ooftish’. Composed 1937; first published Transition 27 (April–May 1938). Originally titled ‘Whiting’. ‘Ooftish’ derives from a Yiddish expression, meaning to lay one’s cash on the table.

  ‘elles viennent’/‘they come’. Composed 25 January 1938; first published (French text only) Temps modernes 14 November 1946, one of twelve poems published there. The English text first appeared in Peggy Guggenheim’s Out of This Century (1946).

  ‘être là sans mâchoires sans dents’. Composed 1937–9; first published Temps modernes 1946. The medieval thinker Roscellinus Compendiensis denied the existence of universals. The image of the Fates cutting the thread of life recurs at the end of the mirlitonnades.

  ‘Ascension’. Composed 1938; first published Temps modernes 1946. The football world cup took place in Paris in 1938. An alternative final couplet occurs in the version Beckett sent MacGreevy on 15 June 1938: ‘en reçoit-il une colombe /aussi souvent que moi’.

  ‘La Mouche’. Composed 1938; first published Temps modernes 1946.

  ‘ainsi a-t-on beau’. Composed 1937–9; first published Temps modernes 1946. Immanuel Kant wrote prolifically on the Lisbon earthquake of 1755.

  ‘Dieppe’. Composed in French in 1937 and published in Temps modernes (French text only). English text first published in the Irish Times 9 June 1945, where ‘lights of old’ read ‘lighted town’. Originates in Hölderlin’s ‘Der Spaziergang’.

  ‘Rue de Vaugirard’. Composed 1937–9. Temps modernes 1946. A thoroughfare near Beckett’s apartment on the rue des Favorites.

  ‘Arènes de Lutèce’. Temps modernes. Lutetia was the Roman name for Paris. The Roman amphitheatre is in the fifth arrondissement. Gabriel de Mortillet (1821–1898) was a French palaeontologist; evidence of Beckett’s interest in palaeontology at this time can be found in the Whoroscope notebook (University of Reading [UoR]).

  ‘Saint-Lô’. First published in the Irish Times 24 June 1946, where l.3 was originally two lines: ‘and the old mind / ghost-abandoned’; revised for Poems in English (1961). The River Vire flows through Saint-Lô, a town in Lower Normandy where Beckett worked for the Red Cross after the war, as described in his radio talk ‘The Capital of the Ruins’.

  ‘bon bon il est un pays’. Composed February 1947; first published Cahiers des saisons 2 October 1955, one of a group of three poems, where it is titled ‘Accul’. A rare example in the Beckett canon of a commissioned text, written at the request of Geer van Velde.

  ‘Mort de A.D’. Composed after the death of Arthur Darley (‘A.D.’), 30 December 1948; first published Cahiers des saisons 1955. Darley, a colleague of Beckett’s at Saint-Lô in Normandy, also features in his final prose work, Stirrings Still.

  ‘vive morte ma seule saison’. Composed 1947–9; first published Cahiers des saisons 1955.

  ‘je suis ce cours de sable qui glisse’/‘my way is in the sand flowing’. Reportedly written by Bec
kett on Killiney Strand, Co. Dublin, during a summer visit to his mother in 1948; French and English versions first published Transition Forty-Eight 2 (June 1948).

  ‘que ferais-je sans ce monde sans visage sans questions’/‘what would I do without this world’. Composed 1948; first published Transition Forty-Eight 2 (June 1948). Line 10 originally ‘comme hier comme avant-hier’.

  ‘je voudrais que mon amour meure’/‘I would like my love to die’. Composed 1948; first published Transition Forty-Eight 2 (June 1948). French text originally et dans les rues (l. 3) and pleurant la seule qui m’ait aimé (l. 4), and English text (l. 4) originally ‘mourning the first and last to love me’.

  ‘Song’. From the play Words and Music, first published in Evergreen Review (1962).

  ‘hors crâne seul dedans’. Composed 1–4 January 1974; first published Minuit 21 (November 1976). Bocca degli Alberti was a traitor, encased in ice in the ninth circle of hell (Inferno XXXII). ‘Something there’ freely translates this French poem.

  ‘Something there’. Composed 1–4 January 1974; first published New Departures 7 ⁄8 and 9⁄10 (August 1975).

  ‘dread nay’. Composed 1974; first published Collected Poems (1977). The chattering sound made by the stork can also be found in Inferno XXXII.

  ‘Roundelay’. Composed July 1976; first published Modern Drama 19 (September 1976).