242 0 / SAMUEL BECKETT
HAMM I'm obliged to you, Clov. For your services.
CLOV [Turning, sharply.] A h pardon, it's I a m obliged to you.
HAMM It's we are obliged to each other. [Pause, CLOvgoes towards door.] One thing more, [CLOV halts.] A last favour. [Exit CLOV.] Cover me with the sheet. [Long pause.] No? Good. [Pause.] M e to play. [Pause. Wearily.] Old endgame lost of old, play and lose and have done with losing. [Pause. More animated.] Let me see. [Paitse.] Ah yes! [He tries to move the chair, using the gaff as before. Enter CLOV, dressed for the road. Panama hat, tweed coat, raincoat over his arm, umbrella, bag. He halts by the door and stands there, impassive and motionless, his eyes fixed on HAMM, till the end. HAMM gives up.] Good. [Pause.] Discard. [He throws away the gaff , makes to throw away the dog, thinks better of it.] Take it easy. [Pause.] An d now? [Pause. ] Raise hat. [He raises his toque.] Peace to our . . . arses. [Pause.] An d put on again. [He puts on his toque.] Deuce. [Pause. He takes off his glasses.] Wipe. [He takes out his handkerchief and, without unfolding it, wipes his glasses.] And put on again. [He puts on his glasses, puts back the handkerchief in his pocket.] We're coming. A few more squirms like that and I'll call. [Pause.] A little poetry. [Pause.] You prayed? [Pause. He corrects himself] You CRIED for night; it comes? [Pause. He corrects himself] It FALLS: now cry in darkness. [He repeats, chanting.] You cried for night; it falls: now cry in darkness.6 [Pause.] Nicely put, that. [Pause.] An d now? [Pause.] Moments for nothing, now as always, time was never and time is over, reckoning closed and story ended. [Pause. Narrative tone.] If he could have his child with him. . . . [Pause.] It was the moment I was waiting for. [Pause.] You don't want to abandon him? You want him to bloom while you are withering? Be there to solace your last million last moments? [Pause.] He doesn't realize, all he knows is hunger, and cold, and death to crown it all. But you! You ought to know what the earth is like, nowadays. O h I put hi m before his responsibilities! [Pause. Normal tone.] Well, there we are, there I am, that's enough. [He raises the whistle to his lips, hesitates, drops it. Pause.] Yes, truly! [He whistles. Pause. Louder. Pause.] Good. [Pause.] Father! [Pause. Louder.] Father! [Pause.] Good. [Pause.] We're coming. [Pause.] An d to end up with? [Pause.] Discard. [He throws away the dog. He tears the whistle from his neck.] With my compliments. [He throws whistle towards auditorium. Pause. He sniffs. Soft.] Clov! [Long pause.] No? Good. [He takes out the handkerchief] Since that's the way we're playing it . . . [He unfolds handkerchief] . . . let's play it that way . . . [He unfolds.] . . . and speak no more about it . . . [He finishes unfolding.] . . . speak no more. [He holds handkerchief spread out before him.] Ol d stancher! [Pause.] You . . . remain. [Pause. He covers his face with handkerchief, lowers his arms to armrests, remains motionless.] [Brief tableau.]
CURTAIN
6. Parody of a line from Charles Baudelaire's poem 'Meditation' that can be translated as: 'You were calling for evening; it falls; it is here.'
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2421
W. H. AUDEN 1907-1973 Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, England, the son of a doctor and of a former nurse. He was educated at private schools and Christ Church, Oxford. After graduation from Oxford he traveled abroad, taught school in England from 1930 to 1935, and later worked for a government film unit. His sympathies in the 1930s were with the left, like those of most intellectuals of his age, and he went to Spain during its Civil War, intending to serve as an ambulance driver on the left-wing Republican side. To his surprise he felt so disturbed by the sight of the many Roman Catholic churches gutted and looted by the Republicans that he returned to England without fulfilling his ambition. He traveled in Iceland and China before moving to the United States in 1939; in 1946 he became an American citizen. He taught at a number of American colleges and was professor of poetry at Oxford from 1956 to 1960. Most of his later life was shared between residences in Ne w York City and in Europe?first in southern Italy, then in Austria.
Auden was the most prominent of the young English poets who, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, saw themselves bringing new techniques and attitudes to English poetry. Stephen Spender, C. Day Lewis, and Louis MacNeice were other liberal and leftist poets in this loosely affiliated group. Auden learned metrical and verbal techniques from Gerard Manley Hopkins and Wilfred Owen, and from T. S. Eliot he took a conversational and ironic tone, an acute inspection of cultural decay. Thomas Hardy's metrical variety, formal irregularity, and fusion of panoramic and intimate perspectives also proved a useful example, and Auden admired W. B. Yeats's 'serious reflective' poems of 'personal and public interest,' though he later came to disavow Yeats's grand aspirations and rhetoric. Auden's English studies at Oxford familiarized him with the rhythms and long alliterative line of Anglo- Saxon poetry. He learned, too, from popular and folk culture, particularly the songs of the English music hall and, later, American blues singers.
The Depression that hit America in 1929 hit England soon afterward, and Auden and his contemporaries looked out at an England of industrial stagnation and mass unemployment, seeing not Eliot's metaphorical Waste Land but a more literal Waste Land of poverty and 'depressed areas.' Auden's early poetry diagnoses the ills of his country. This diagnosis, conducted in a verse that combines irreverence with craftsmanship, draws on both Freud and Marx to show England now as a nation of neurotic invalids, now as the victim of an antiquated economic system. The intellectual liveliness and nervous force of this work made a great impression, even though the compressed, elliptical, impersonal style created difficulties of interpretation.
Gradually Auden sought to clarify his imagery and syntax, and in the late 1930s he produced 'Lullaby,' 'Musee des Beaux Arts,' 'In Memory of W. B. Yeats,' and other poems of finely disciplined movement, pellucid clarity, and deep yet unsentimental feeling. Some of the poems he wrote at this time, such as 'Spain' and 'September 1,
1939,' aspire to a visionary perspective on political and social change; but as Auden became increasingly skeptical of poetry in the grand manner, of poetry as revelation or as a tool for political change, he removed these poems from his canon. (He came to see as false his claim in 'September 1, 1939' that 'We must love one another or die.') 'Poetry is not magic,' he said in the essay 'Writing,' but a form of truth telling that should 'disenchant and disintoxicate.' As he continued to remake his style during World War II, he created a voice that, in contrast not only to Romanticism but also to the authoritarianism devastating Europe, was increasingly flat, ironic, and conversational. He never lost his ear for popular speech or his ability to combine elements from popular art with technical formality. He daringly mixed the grave and the flippant, vivid detail and allegorical abstraction. He always experimented, particularly in ways of bringing together high artifice and a colloquial tone.
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2422 / W. H. AUDEN
The poems of Auden's last phase are increasingly personal in tone and combine an air of offhand informality with remarkable technical skill in versification. He turned out, as if effortlessly, poems in numerous verse forms, including sestinas, sonnets, ballads, canzones, syllabics, haiku, the blues, even limericks. As he became ever more mistrustful of a prophetic role for the poet, he embraced the ordinary?the hours of the day, the rooms of a house, a changeable landscape. He took refuge in love and friendship, particularly the love and friendship he shared with the American writer Chester Kallmann. Like Eliot, Auden became a member of the Church of England, and the emotions of his late poetry?sometimes comic, sometimes solemn?were grounded in an ever deepening but rarely obtrusive religious feeling. In the last year of his life he returned to England to live in Oxford, feeling the need to be part of a university community as a protection against loneliness. Auden is now generally recognized as one of the
