Selected Poems 1930-1988 (3 page)
Read Selected Poems 1930-1988 Online
Authors: Samuel Beckett
| March | Poèmes (Paris: Minuit). |
| December | Watt, translated into French with Ludovic and Agnès Janvier (Paris: Minuit). |
| 1969 | Â |
| 23 October | Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Sans (Paris: Minuit). |
| 1970 | Â |
| April | Mercier et Camier (Paris: Minuit). Premier amour (Paris: Minuit). |
| July | Lessness, translation of Sans (London: Calder). |
| September | Le Dépeupleur (Paris: Minuit). |
| 1972 | Â |
| January | The Lost Ones, translation of Le Dépeupleur (London: Calder; New York: Grove). The North, part of The Lost Ones, illustrated with etchings by Arikha (London: Enitharmon Press). |
| 1973 | Â |
| January | Not I (London: Faber). |
| July | First Love (London: Calder). |
| 1974 | Â |
| Â | Mercier and Camier (London: Calder). |
| 1975 | Â |
| Spring | Directs Godot in Berlin and Pas moi (translation of Not I ) in Paris. |
| 1976 | Â |
| February | Pour finir encore et autres foirades (Paris: Minuit). |
| 20 May | Directs Billie Whitelaw in Footfalls, which is performed with That Time at London's Royal Court Theatre in honour of Beckett's seventieth birthday. |
| Autumn | All Strange Away, illustrated with etchings by Edward Gorey (New York: Gotham Book Mart). Foirades/Fizzles, in French and English, illustrated with etchings by Jasper Johns (New York: Petersburg Press). |
| December | Footfalls (London: Faber). |
| 1977 | Â |
| March | Collected Poems in English and French (London: Calder; New York: Grove). |
| 1978 | Â |
| May | Pas, translation of Footfalls (Paris: Minuit). |
| August | Poèmes, suivi de mirlitonnades (Paris: Minuit). |
| 1980 | Â |
| January | Compagnie (Paris: Minuit). Company (London: Calder). |
| May | Directs Endgame in London with Rick Cluchey and the San Quentin Drama Workshop. |
| 1981 | Â |
| 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 | Â |
| 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 | Â |
| 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 1930â1978 (London: Calder). |
| July | Collected Shorter Prose 1945â1980 (London: Calder). |
| 1989 | Â |
| 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. |
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| 1990 | Â |
| Â | As the Story Was Told: Uncollected and Late Prose (London: Calder; New York: Riverrun Press). |
| 1992 | Â |
| Â | Dream of Fair to Middling Women (Dublin: Black Cat Press). |
| 1995 | Â |
| Â | Eleutheria (Paris: Minuit). |
| 1996 | Â |
| Â | Eleutheria , translated into English by Barbara Wright (London: Faber). |
| 1998 | Â |
| Â | No Author Better Served:The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, edited by Maurice Harmon (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press). |
| 2000 | Â |
| Â | Beckett on Film : nineteen films, by different directors, of Beckett's works for the stage (RTÃ, Channel 4, and Irish Film Board; DVD, London: Clarence Pictures). |
| 2006 | Â |
| Â | Samuel Beckett:Works for Radio:The Original Broadcasts : five works spanning the period 1957â1976 (CD, London: British Library Board). |
| 2009 | Â |
| Â | The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929â1940, edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). |
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Compiled by Cassandra Nelson
Â
Draft of poem from
mirlitonnades
Courtesy of the Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading.
© The Estate of Samuel Beckett.
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 â 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.
Â
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 â
blood!
Oh Harvey belovèd
how shall the red and white, the many in the few,
(dear bloodswirling Harvey)
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eddy through that cracked beater?
And the fourth Henry came to the crypt of the arrow.
What's that?
How long?
Sit on it.
Â
A wind of evil flung my despair of ease
against the sharp spires of the one
lady:
not once or twice butâ¦.
(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 â
what am I saying! the gentle canvas â
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 â¦!)
and grant me my second
starless inscrutable hour.
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. |
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| 4 | Descartes passed on the easier problems in analytical geometry to his valet Gillot. |
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| 5â10 | 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. |
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| 17 | He solved problems submitted by these mathematicians. |
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| 21â26 | The attempt at swindling on the part of his elder brother Pierre de la Bretaillière â The money he received as a soldier. |
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| 27 | Franz Hals. |
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| 29â30 | As a child he played with a little cross-eyed girl. |
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| 31â35 | His daughter died of scarlet fever at the age of six. |
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| 37â40 | Honoured Harvey for his discovery of the circulation of the blood, but would not admit that he had explained the motion of the heart. |
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| 41 | The heart of Henri IV was received at the Jesuit college of La Flèche while Descartes was still a student there. |
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| 45â53 | His visions and pilgrimage to Loretto. |
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| 56â65 | His Eucharistic sophistry, in reply to the Jansenist Antoine Arnauld, who challenged him to reconcile his doctrine of matter with the doctrine of transubstantiation. |
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| 68 | Schurmann, the Dutch blue-stocking, a pious pupil of Voët, the adversary of Descartes. |
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| 73â76 | Saint Augustine has a revelation in the shrubbery and reads Saint Paul. |
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| 77â83 | He proves God by exhaustion. |
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| 91â93 | 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. |
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| 94 | Weulles, a Peripatetic Dutch physician at the Swedish court, and an enemy of Descartes. |