Samuel Beckett was an Irish novelist, playwright, poet, and Nobel laureate. He wrote in both English and French and is best known for works including Waiting for Godot.
Samuel Beckett
Serena 1
From Echo's Bones, 1935, reprinted in Collected Poems in English and French. John Calder, 1977.
without the grand old British Museum
Thales and the Aretino
on the bosom of the Regent's Park the phlox
crackles under the thunder
scarlet beauty in our world dead fish adrift...I find me taking the Crystal Palace
for the Blessed Isles from Primrose Hill
alas I must be that kind of person
hence in Kenwood who shall find me
my breath held in the midst of thickets
none but the most quarried lovers
The author of Waiting for Godot lived in London for several years in the 1930's, 'scraping a living by occasional reviews and half-heartedly looking for work' (Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett). Lawrence E. Harvey, in Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (Princeton University Press, 1970), comments that 'Serena 1 envisions the world as a cruel and painful place... "Quarried" like animals in the forest, the lovers become the object of a murderous hunt...It is true that the phlox in Regent's Park is "scarlet beauty", but it crackles under the assault of the thunder and exists in a world likened to a "dead fish adrift." The narrator...ruefully admits, "Alas, I must be that kind of person"...the inveterate idealist, sensitive to beauty, desiring, needing, demanding more of perfection than earth has to offer...'