Veteran AF: Poems in English by Samuel Beckett, Book 45 0f 2022

Thursday, December 15, 2022

Poems in English by Samuel Beckett, Book 45 0f 2022

I picked up this book at the Franklin and Marshall College Library Book Sale. I have lately been reading Shakespeare's sonnets, so I thought I would reading 20th Century verse by a witty playwright. The wit and wordplay are there, but after reading the hope and ardor in Shakespeare, Beckett is very sad in a visceral way.

From a summary of his work by the Poetry Foundation:

Throughout Beckett’s work we can find evidence of his conviction that everything is hopeless, meaningless, purposeless, and, above all, agonizing to endure. Beckett’s people are leveled off and merged into each other by being all more or less physically disabled—as if this were really the common condition on earth. … Beckett is a prophet of negation and sterility. He holds out no hope to humanity, only a picture of unrelieved blackness; and those who profess to see in Beckett signs of a Christian approach or signs of compassion are simply refusing to see what is there.” Perhaps Beckett himself stated his dilemma most succinctly in L’Innommable: “Dans ma vie, puisqu’il faut l’appeler ainsi, il y eut trois choses, l’impossibilite de parler, l’impossibilite de me taire, et la solitude.” (“One must speak; man cannot possibly communicate with his fellows, but the alternative—silence—is irreconcilable with human existence.”)

Which is what I felt reading the book.

Here is the poem "What I Would Do Without This World"

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 wave 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

Beckett won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969.

First 44 Books of 2022: