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Beckett's Cascando - Diminishment In Tone

 Cascando by Samuel Beckett (1936)

 

1

 

why not merely the despaired of

occasion of

wordshed

 

is it not better abort than be barren

 

 

the hours after you are gone are so leaden

they will always start dragging too soon

the grapples clawing blindly the bed of want

bringing up the bones the old loves

sockets filled once with eyes like yours

all always is it better too soon than never

the black want splashing their faces

saying again nine days never floated the loved

nor nine months

nor nine lives

 

2

 

saying again

if you do not teach me I shall not learn

saying again there is a last

even of last times

last times of begging

last times of loving

of knowing not knowing pretending

a last even of last times of saying

if you do not love me I shall not be loved

if I do not love you I shall not love

the churn of stale words in the heart again

love love love thud of the old plunger

pestling the unalterable

whey of words

 

terrified again

of not loving

of loving and not you

of being loved and not by you

of knowing not knowing pretending

pretending

 

I and all the others that will love you

if they love you

 

3

 

unless they love you

 

*** 


Cascando – diminishing in tone, decrease in volume and deceleration in tempo

‘The occasion prompting the poem was Beckett meeting, and thinking he had fallen in love with, an American friend of Mary Manning Howe, Betty Stockton Farley, who did not reciprocate his feelings, although soon 'wordshed' seems to have taken over from those feelings’

‘bringing up the bones the old loves’ – reference to Echo’s Bones (published posthumously in 2014)

Echo’s Bones from Ovid’s Metamorphoses – ‘Echo’s bones were turned to stone’ – her love for Narcissus unrequited, Echo pines away until only her voice and bones remain

‘The dead die hard, they are trespassers on the beyond, they must take the place as they find it, the shafts and the manholes into the muck, till such time as the lord of the manor incurs through his long acquiescence a duty of care in respect of them. Then they are free among the dead by all means, then their troubles are over, their natural troubles … but the debt of nature … can no more be discharged by the mere fact of kicking the bucket than descent can be made into the same stream twice’ (from Echo’s Bones)

‘Saying again’ generates the bare bones of an echo, ‘the last echo of feeling’ (MacGreevy)

Circumcision of the poem (Beckett - ‘pruned down by a tenth of an ounce’) – ‘is it not better to abort’


*** 

Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish novelist, playwright, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. A resident of Paris for most of his adult life, he wrote in both French and English.

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