Selected Poems 1930-1988 (10 page)

APPENDIX

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‘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 Beckett 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).

‘mirlitonnades'. Poèmes, suivi de mirlitonnades
(Minuit, 1978). The make-up of the sequence varies from edition to edition of Beckett's poetry; this printing follows the original text. After this publication Beckett continued to write new poems in French and English in the
sottisier
notebook. Manuscripts in Trinity College, Dublin describe poems written in the late 1980s as ‘
mirlitonnades
', making a case for all his short late poems to be seen as implicit additions to the sequence. A
mirliton
is a kazoo, and
mirlitonnades
doggerel verse in which to wrap the instrument. The Mare-Chaudron and rue de Courtablon are places in Ussy, whither Beckett retreated from Paris and did much of his writing in later life. The dark sister of ‘
noire sœur
' is Atropos (cf. note to ‘
être là sans mâchoires sans dents
'). The hare of ‘
à bout de songes un bouquin
' derives from La Fontaine's ‘
Le Lièvre et les grenouilles
'.

‘one dead of night'. Composed June 1977; first published
Poetry Review
86:3 1996.

‘there', ‘again gone'. Composed 1981; first published (together with a third, ‘head on hands') under the single title ‘pss' in
New Departures
14 (1982), but recourse to the
sottisier
notebook clarifies that they are separate poems. ‘there' answers Petruchio's question in
The Taming of the Shrew
: ‘Where is the life that late I led?'

‘bail bail till better/founder'. Composed 11 April 1981 (UoR
sottisier
notebook).

‘Là'. Composed 19 January 1987; first published
Journal of Beckett Studies
[
JOBS
] 1.1 and 2 1992, where it carried a dedication ‘For Jim' (James Knowlson).

‘Go where never before'. Composed 24 January 1987; English version of ‘Là', first published together in
JOBS
1.1 and 2 1992.

‘Brief Dream'. Composed November 1987; first published
JOBS
1.1 and 2 1992.

Comment dire
/what is the word. French text dated 29 October 1988, English text 23 April 1989. Composed 1988; first published
Libération
1 June 1989 (‘
Comment dire
') and
Sunday Correspondent
31 December 1989 (‘what is the word'). ‘what is the word' was Beckett's last piece of writing.

‘Delta'.
This Quarter
2.4 April–May–June 1930. Eugenio Montale (1896–1981), Italian poet, Nobel Prize for Literature 1975.

‘Louis Armstrong'. From Nancy Cunard's
Negro, An Anthology
(1934). Ernst Moerman (1897–1944), Belgian author and film director.

‘Drunken Boat'. Whiteknights Press (Reading, 1976). Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891), French poet. Beckett offered the translation to
This Quarter
in 1932, but the journal ceased publication shortly afterwards. The text was believed lost for decades before resurfacing in 1975; it was first published in a limited edition the following year.