Yeatsian inflections here and there, particularly Beckett’s ‘nod’ to Yeats’s A Vision (1927, revd. 1934).31 Of those who knew Beckett, it is clear that like so many of his generation in Ireland and subsequently until the late 1960s or 1970s, poetry was considered a ‘spoken’ art. As such, Beckett would have been schooled from an early age to remember poems (hymns, songs) by reciting them. Testimonials record his great ability, ‘even in delirium’,32 to recite poetry.
In Four Dubliners, Richard Ellmann remarks, ‘among Yeats’s poems Beckett had distinct preferences’33 and it is clear from the recollections of John Montague in both his memoirs,34 along with other anecdotal evidence, that Beckett identified with Yeats’s poetry the processes of his own maturity and ageing as a man and as a writer. He ‘singled out unerringly’, Ellmann notes, ‘the one [of Yeats’s early poems] that was most extraordinary … “He Wishes His Beloved Were Dead”’.35
We know from several sources that Beckett would quote from memory lines from The Countess Cathleen and, as Ellmann tells it, so much else was quick to Beckett’s mind, even towards the very end of his own life. Anne Atik movingly reveals this ability in her poignant memoir, and Gerry Dukes relates the time when he and the critic Hugh Kenner called upon Beckett ‘at the cheerless nursing home’ the month after his wife’s funeral in July 1989:36
Just before we left, Beckett recited, in a quavering voice, the last verse paragraph of W. B. Yeats’s poem ‘The Tower’ … [It] had first appeared in book form in 1928, the very year that Beckett had first arrived in Paris. It made a most moving valedictory.
Between both Ellmann and Atik, a cluster of poems emerges. Indeed to quote Ellmann, ‘There were bundles of memories’:37 ‘The Old Men Admiring Themselves in the Water’ (In the Seven Woods, 1904), ‘A Drinking Song’ (The Green Helmet, 1910), ‘Girl’s Song’ (The Winding Stair, 1933), ‘Why Should Old Men Not Be Mad’ (On the Boiler, 1939), ‘Crazy Jane’, ‘Mad Tom’, as well as the Swift play, The Words Upon the Window Pane, Yeats’s Oedipus, At the Hawk’s Well, Purgatory, of course, and Yeats’s Byzantium poems, constructed as artifice, yet contained within that lonely solo voice’s rhetoric which so captivated Beckett:
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress[.]38
Beckett’s mother had kept him informed back in 1948 with an account in the Irish Times of Yeats’s reburial in Ireland;39 four years later, in 1952, Beckett is recommending to a friend that he should look out Yeats’s and Synge’s Deirdre plays, pointing to Yeatsian references when the subject of Ireland comes up with his correspondents; responding to requests, such as Cyril Cusack’s, for a Beckett response to a Shaw festival with the famous line: ‘What I would do is give the whole unupsettable apple-cart for a sup of the Hawk’s well, or the Saints’, or a whiff of Juno, to go no further.’40 A little later, in July 1956, he writes to the Irish novelist Aidan Higgins:
The Yanks want the Proust but I hesitate. Shall be sending you Malone. Suppose you are glad to be getting shut of London. Queer the way you all go to Ireland when you get a holiday. Piss on the White Rock for me and cast a cold eye on the granite beginning on the cliff face.41
It is from a little later again, 1959, that Anne Atik’s memoir shows the full force of Yeats breaking through Beckett’s own imaginative contact with others that will last until the very end of his life. Indeed, Deirdre Bair has Beckett only a couple of years later, in 1961, absorbed in reading W.B. Yeats’s Collected Poems.42 In Atik’s recollections, Yeats’s poetry features prominently in conversation.43 Beckett also refers Atik to ‘the correspondence between Yeats and Dorothy Wellesley,44 saying he thought it would interest me’. ‘Each time he came back to Yeats’s last poems, and each time would urge me to read them again. A standard of comparison.’45
This may be why James Mays hears in Beckett’s Lessness (1970), ‘an extended meditation on the line from Yeats’s poem “The Black Tower”’.46Atik’s memoir revisits Beckett’s recitation in 1983, as Beckett ‘wobbling on his legs … from ageing’47 talks about Synge, Lady Gregory and Yeats and incidentally writes from memory and without error a Synge poem – ‘Epitaph’:48
A silent sinner, nights and days,
No human heart to him drew nigh,
Alone he would his wanton ways,
Alone and little loved did die.
And autumn Death for him did choose,
A season dank with mists and rain,
And took him, while the evening dews
Were settling o’er the fields again.
Later still, towards the end, Beckett is retelling stories about ‘Yeats, and Yeats’s father who stayed in New York for seventeen years’.49 Atik’s final recollection of Beckett I repeat without comment; it is about ‘Joyce’s admiration for Yeats, the showy wreath he sent to his [friend’s] funeral’: ‘“He liked to make that sort of gesture,” says Beckett, who then continues to recite poems of Yeats, who “had written some great poems”, including “The Tower” – a poem Beckett had read after his friend’s Con Leventhal’s cremation.’50
The death of friends, or death
Of every brilliant eye
That made a catch in the breath –
Seem but the clouds in the sky.51
Beckett is also reported to have told his friend Eoin O’Brien that the lines on the poet ‘making his soul’ were Yeats’s greatest – the concluding third part of ‘The Tower’:
Till the wreck of body,
Slow decay of blood,
Testy delirium
Or dull decrepitude,
Or what worse evil come –
‘About old people,’ Beckett remarked, ‘Yeats has written a good poem about old age, “a tattered thing”.’52 Ten days after making this comment, Beckett himself had passed away.
During this final stretch, in John Montague’s recollection Beckett had been reading Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’: ‘It’s very beautiful,’ Beckett said. Montague suggests he had ‘gone back to the pleasant discoveries of boyhood’, and Montague reflects that he had not heard Beckett ‘use the word “beautiful” before, except in connection with Yeats. I mention that to him, and he nods. “Ah, yes, yes, beautiful, too.”’53
It is therefore apt that Nicholas Grene should summon Beckett’s Molloy to his side to act as the epigraphic opening to his subtle and restorative study, Yeats’s Poetic Codes:54 ‘All I know is what the words know.’55 And thinking of what we all now know it is precious wonder that Beckett should deem it fitting in … but the clouds … to rewrite Yeats’s great concluding lines of ‘The Tower’ with a piece of theatre all his own – a teleplay that Yeats would surely have understood as the act of praise it is. But also as an acknowledgement that Terence Brown, in concluding his Yeats biography, sees as much an act of ‘creative appropriation’ as it is ‘fitting’, more:
that Beckett’s ghost play for television … but
