Read Online Selected Poems 1930-1988 by Samuel Beckett - Free Book Online

folle, escorté des hippocampes noirs,
    Quand les juillets faisaient crouler à coups de triques
    Les cieux ultramarins aux ardents entonnoirs;
    Moi qui tremblais, sentant geindre à cinquante lieues
    Le rut des Béhémots et des Maelstroms épais,
    Fileur éternel des immobilités bleues,
    Je regrette l’Europe aux anciens parapets!
    J’ai vu des archipels sidéraux! et des îles
    Dont les cieux délirants sont ouverts au vogueur:
    â€“ Est-ce en ces nuits sans fond que tu dors et t’exiles,
    Million d’oiseaux d’or, ô future Vigueur? –
    Mais, vrai, j’ai trop pleuré! Les Aubes sont navrantes.
    Toute lune est atroce et tout soleil amer:
    L’âcre amour m’a gonflé de torpeurs enivrantes.
    O que ma quille éclate! O que j’aille à la mer!
    Si je désire une eau d’Europe, c’est la flache
    Noire et froide où vers le crépuscule embaumé
    Un enfant accroupi, plein de tristesse, lâche
    Un bateau frêle comme un papillon de mai.
    Je ne puis plus, baigné de vos langueurs, ô lames,
    Enlever leur sillage aux porteurs de cotons,
    Ni traverser l’orgueil des drapeaux et des flammes,
    Ni nager sous les yeux horribles des pontons.

Drunken Boat
    Downstream on impassive rivers suddenly
    I felt the towline of the boatmen slacken.
    Redskins had taken them in a scream and stripped them and
    Skewered them to the glaring stakes for targets.
    Then, delivered from my straining boatmen,
    From the trivial racket of trivial crews and from
    The freights of Flemish grain and English cotton,
    I made my own course down the passive rivers.
    Â 
    Blanker than the brain of a child I fled
    Through winter, I scoured the furious jolts of the tides,
    In an uproar and a chaos of Peninsulas,
    Exultant, from their moorings in triumph torn.
    I started awake to tempestuous hallowings.
    Nine nights I danced like a cork on the billows, I danced
    On the breakers, sacrificial, for ever and ever,
    And the crass eye of the lanterns was expunged.
    More firmly bland than to children apples’ firm pulp,
    Soaked the green water through my hull of pine,
    Scattering helm and grappling and washing me
    Of the stains, the vomitings and blue wine.
    Thenceforward, fused in the poem, milk of stars,
    Of the sea, I coiled through deeps of cloudless green,
    Where, dimly, they come swaying down,
    Rapt and sad, singly, the drowned;

    Where, under the sky’s haemorrhage, slowly tossing
    In thuds of fever, arch-alcohol of song,
    Pumping over the blues in sudden stains,
    The bitter rednesses of love ferment.
    I know the heavens split with lightnings and the currents
    Of the sea and its surgings and its spoutings; I know evening,
    And dawn exalted like a cloud of doves.
    And my eyes have fixed phantasmagoria.
    I have seen, as shed by ancient tragic footlights,
    Out from the horror of the low sun’s mystic stains,
    Long weals of violet creep across the sea
    And peals of ague rattle down its slats.
    I have dreamt the green night’s drifts of dazzled snow,
    The slow climb of kisses to the eyes of the seas,
    The circulation of unheard saps,
    And the yellow-blue alarum of phosphors singing.

    I have followed months long the maddened herds of the surf
    Storming the reefs, mindless of the feet,
    The radiant feet of the Marys that constrain
    The stampedes of the broken-winded Oceans.
    I have fouled, be it known, unspeakable Floridas, tangle of
    The flowers of the eyes of panthers in the skins of
    Men and the taut rainbows curbing,
    Beyond the brows of the seas, the glaucous herds.
    I have seen Leviathan sprawl rotting in the reeds
    Of the great seething swamp-nets;
    The calm sea disembowelled in waterslides
    And the cataracting of the doomed horizons.
    Iridescent waters, glaciers, suns of silver, flagrant skies,
    And dark creeks’ secret ledges, horror-strewn,
    Where giant reptiles, pullulant with lice,
    Lapse with dark perfumes from the writhing trees.

    I would