`A Poet Down to His Teguments'

In his final year, Samuel Beckett gave brief poems in English to two friends. To James Knowlson, future author of Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, he wrote four untitled lines:

“Go where never before
No sooner there than there always
No matter where never before
No sooner there than there always.”

And to his publisher, John Calder, he sent “Brief Dream”:

“go end there
one fine day
where never till then
till as much as to say
no matter where
no matter when”

The first line of the first poem contains an unfortunate echo of the kitschy Star Trek intro, though it’s probably safe to assume that the formidably allusive Beckett intended no allusion. Both poems concern death and both begin with “go,” but not a commanding, propulsive “go,” but one that is paradoxically passive and resigned. The same verb shows up in the familiar, final phrases of The Unnamable: “you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” In How It Was: A Memoir of Samuel Beckett, his friend Anne Atik, wife of the painter Avigdor Arikha, writes:

“Beckett was a poet down to his teguments, ligaments, cells; standing or sitting, poetry’s presence in his presence was as pervasive as oxygen.”

Beckett could recite volumes of poetry from memory, and his taste was exquisite – Dante, Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, Yeats. He had other admirations that shouldn’t surprise us: Swift, Sterne, Osip Mandelstam, Saul Bellow, Johnson’s biographer W. Jackson Bate. Significantly, even in old age, Beckett favored the ever-youthful John Keats, who was 25 years and four months old when de died. Atik tells us:

“Sam would quote from Keats; loved `full-throated ease,’ `To take into the air my quiet breath’ and `While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad’ (from `Ode to a Nightingale’); agreed that Shelley’s `Pourest thy full breast/In profuse strains of unpremeditated art’ enacted a similar ecstasy of birdsong, but, while admiring it, would come back to Keats’s `full-throated ease’ and the Letters. We didn’t talk about or read from the Letters until the 1970s, when I first read them. I mentioned the `Negative Capability’ passage to Sam, who of course had read it when he studied Keats; when I came to `when a man is capable of being uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’ he became tense with attention, suddenly sitting bolt upright as though pierced by an electric current, and asked me to read it again at the table, and repeated excitedly, `irritable reaching after fact and reason – that’s it, capable of being in uncertainties.’ He didn’t have to explain why he found this so important; the link to his own work was so obvious.”

In the two late Beckett poems cited above, I hear attenuated echoes of Keats. Listen to the sixth stanza of “Ode to a Nightingale”:

“Darkling I listen; and for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain--
To thy high requiem become a sod.”

By happy coincidence I have been re-reading Beckett’s poetry at the same time I have been reading The 64 Sonnets, all of Keats’ work in that form published for the first time in a single volume, by Paul Dry Books in 2004. Keats closes a sonnet he wrote in March 1819 (“Why did I laugh tonight? No voice will tell”), less than two years before, with this couplet:

“Verse, Fame, and Beauty are intense indeed,
But Death intenser--Death is Life's high meed.”

Beckett, I think, would have approved. In this context, a synonym for “meed” is reward.