Free Collected Poems in English and French by Samuel Beckett Page B

days; shorter or longer under the hen and the result, he says, is disgusting.
    He kept his own birthday to himself so that no astrologer could cast his nativity.
    The shuttle of a ripening egg combs the warp of his days.
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3

In 1640 the brothers Boot refuted Aristotle in Dublin.
4

Descartes passed on the easier problems in analytical geometry to his valet Gillot.
5–10

Refer to his contempt for Galileo Jr., (whom he confused with the more musical Galileo Sr.), and to his expedient sophistry concerning the movement of the earth.
17

He solved problems submitted by these mathematicians.
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21–26

The attempt at swindling on the part of his elder brother Pierre de la Bretaillière—The money he received as a soldier.
27

Franz Hals.
29–30

As a child he played with a little cross-eyed girl.
31–35

His daughter died of scarlet fever at the age of six.
37–40

Honoured Harvey for his discovery of the circulation of the blood, but would not admit that he had explained the motion of the heart.
41

The heart of Henri iv was received at the Jesuit college of La Flèche while Descartes was still a student there.
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45–53

His visions and pilgrimage to Loretto.
56–65

His Eucharistic sophistry, in reply to the Jansenist Antoine Arnauld, who challenged him to reconcile his doctrine of matter with the doctrine of transubstantiation.
68

Schurmann, the Dutch blue-stocking, a pious pupil of Voët, the adversary of Descartes.
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73–76

Saint Augustine has a revelation in the shrubbery and reads Saint Paul.
77–83

He proves God by exhaustion.
91–93

Christina, queen of Sweden. At Stockholm, in November, she required Descartes, who had remained in bed till midday all his life, to be with her at five o'clock in the morning.
94

Weulles, a Peripatetic Dutch physician at the Swedish court, and an enemy of Descartes.

2. GNOME
Gnome
    Spend the years of learning squandering
    Courage for the years of wandering
    Through a world politely turning
    From the loutishness of learning.
    1934

3. HOME OLGA
Home Olga
    J might be made sit up for a jade of hope (and exile,
    don't you know)
    And Jesus and Jesuits juggernauted in the haemorrhoidal
    isle,
    Modo et forma anal maiden, giggling to death in stomacho.
    E for the erythrite of love and silence and the sweet noo
    style,
    Swoops and loops of love and silence in the eye of the sun
    and view of the mew,
    Juvante Jah and a Jain or two and the tip of a friendly
    yiddophile.
    O for an opal of faith and cunning winking adieu, adieu,
    adieu.
    Yesterday shall be tomorrow, riddle me that my rapparee.
    Che sarà sarà che fu, there's more than Homer knows how
    to spew,
    Exempli gratia: ecce himself and the pickthank agnus
    —e.o.o.e.
    1932

4. ECHO'S BONES
The Vulture
    dragging his hunger through the sky
    of my skull shell of sky and earth

    stooping to the prone who must
    soon take up their life and walk

    mocked by a tissue that may not serve
    till hunger earth and sky be offal

Enueg I
    Exeo in a spasm
    tired of my darling's red sputum
    from the Portobello Private Nursing Home
    its secret things
    and toil to the crest of the surge of the steep perilous bridge
    and lapse down blankly under the scream of the hoarding
    round the bright stiff banner of the hoarding
    into a black west
    throttled with clouds.

    Above the mansions the algum-trees
    the mountains
    my skull sullenly
    clot of anger
    skewered aloft strangled in the cang of the wind
    bites like a dog against its chastisement.

    I trundle along rapidly now on my ruined feet
    flush with the livid canal;
    at Parnell Bridge a dying barge
    carrying a cargo of nails and timber
    rocks itself softly in the foaming cloister of the lock;
    on the far bank a gang of down and outs would seem to
    be mending a beam.
    Then for miles only wind
    and the weals creeping alongside on the water
    and the world opening up to the south
    across a travesty of champaign to the mountains
    and the stillborn evening turning a filthy