Collected poems [of] Austin Clarke Book

Although born in Ireland, Beckett is known to have written in French in the years following his immigration to France. French, he explained, removed him from the comforts of his mother tongue, from the ease of writing in his mother tongue. French forced him to write economically; it forced him to think more fundamentally and thereby encourage greater clarity.

Beckett's shift toward writing in French also reflects the culmination of the attributes that will characterize his style. It is evident first in the TWO POEMS, and then in the FOUR POEMS (bilingual, translated by the author).

His early poems are a different story. "Whoroscope", written in 1930 (apparently for a contest that Beckett was encouraged to enter), is clearly influenced by James Joyce's FINNEGAN'S WAKE (written over a period of seventeen years and published in 1939). At the time, Beckett was close to Joyce, apparently assisting with the composition of FINNEGAN'S WAKE (Joyce was then nearly blind), and contributing to OUR EXAMINATION OF WORK IN PROGRESS (a collection of essays on FINNEGAN'S WAKE)...

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.
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
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 milled 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!
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 beloved
how shall the red and white, the many in the
few,
(dear boodswirling Harvey)
eddy through that crack 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 one or twice but…
(Kip of Christ hatch it!)
in the 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.

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.
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 froleur!
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
(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
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,
(Rene' du Perron...!)
and grant me my second
starless inscrutable hour.
(pg. 9-12)

Here, more so than ECHO'S BONES, Beckett displays hints of the writer he will become, with the introduction of characters with odd names, the use of colloquialism in the place of Joyce-inspired word play. Of course the poem contains its share of Joyce-inspired allusion, drawing from a biography of René Descartes that Beckett happened to be reading at the time.

In ECHO'S BONES, Joyce's influence on Beckett's poetry is at its strongest. This is evident in his wordplay and his use of allusion (the name itself, "Echo's Bones", is an allusion to the myth of Echo and Narcissus, told in Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book III)...

dragging his hunger through the sky
of my skill 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
- The Vulture (pg. 17)

There are times, too, when Beckett's wordplay descends into seeming nonsense, like the gibberish spoken by the character Lucky in Beckett's WAITING FOR GODOT...

"Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell and suffers like the divine Miranda with those who for reasons unknown but time will tell are plunged in torment plunged in fire whose fire flames if that continues and who can doubt it will fire the firmament that is to say blast heaven to hell so blue still and calm so calm with a calm which even though intermittent is better than nothing but not so fast and considering what is more that as a result of the labours left unfinished crowned by the Acacacacademy of Anthropopopometry of Essy-in-Possy of Testew and Cunard it is established beyond all doubt all other doubt than that which clings to the labours of men that as a result of the labours unfinished of Testew and Cunard it is established as hereinafter but not so fast for reasons unknown that as a result of the public works of Puncher and Wattmann it is established beyond all doubt that in view of the labours of Fartov and Belcher...."
- Lucky in WAITING FOR GODOT

(Indeed, its nonsense. With the variation of names - "Puncher and Wattmann", "Testew and Cunard", "Fartov and Belcher" - Beckett is mocking academia, particularly with "Fartov and Belcher", and referencing a literary device employed by Lewis Carroll, the master of nonsense.)

müüüüüüüde now
potwalloping now through the promenades
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
- Sanies I (pg. 25)

Here, the poems of ECHO'S BONES are more Beckett than Joyce. The "müüüüüüüde" of "Sanies I" stands in for the "quaquaquaqua" of WAITING FOR GODOT. But overall, the presence of Joyce is still stronger than the presence of Beckett.

It's not until "Cascando" (from the TWO POEMS) that the reader encounters Beckett's familiar style...

Why not merely the despaired of
occasion of
wordshed

is it not better abort than be barren
(pg. 41)

"Cascando", dated 1936, is not yet the minimalist style that Beckett would employ as his writing progressed. But it signifies a shift away from Joyce's influence, toward his own individual and idiosyncratic style. In his early poems, we see the influence of Joyce and perhaps even the Surrealists, but in "Cascando" we see more clearly than in ECHO'S BONES the beginning of Beckett's exploration of existential themes, the beginning of Beckett the absurdist.

Where "Cascando" fails to capture Beckett's minimalism, "Saint-Lô", dated 1946, fully realizes it...

Vire will wind in other shadows
unborn through the bright ways tremble
and the old mind ghost-forsaken
sink into its havoc
(pg. 43)

It is not only the poem's length (four lines) but Beckett's refusal to include basic conjunctions that distinguishes his minimalism. Here, as in the FOUR POEMS, Beckett's clarity is achieved in his economy of words, though clarity may not be apparent in what looks to some like a jumble, but in this jumble can be extracted a wealth of suggestions. Just as Beckett offers meaning (or lack thereof) in the symbolism of Waiting for Godot, meaning (or lack thereof) is found in the suggestions of his poetry...

1
DIEPPE

again the last ebb
the dead shingle
the turning then the steps
towards the lighted town


2

my way is in the sand flowering
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

my peace is there in the receding mist
when I may cease from treading these long shifting thresholds
and life the space of a door
that opens and shuts


3

what would I do without this world faceless incurious
where to be lasts but an instant where every instant
spills in the void the ignorance of having been
without this eave where in the end
body and shadow together are engulfed
what would I do without this silence where the murmurs die
the pantings the frenzies towards succour towards love
without this sky that soars
above its ballast dust

what would I do what I did yesterday and the day before
peering out of my deadlight looking for another
wandering like me eddying far from all the living
in a convulsive space
among the voices voiceless
that throng my hiddenness


4

I would like me love to die
and the rain to be falling on the graveyard
and on me walking the streets
mourning the first and last to love me

(pg. 46 - 53)