with the note La, and Words responds with jagged Sprechstimme, in its turn
“improved,” as he puts it, with an ascending scale provided by Music, that
Joe’s words now mimic. Music now follows Words’s lead, taking up Joe’s sug-
gestion as he tries to intone the whole song. But halfway through this se-
quence it is Music who makes the “suggestions” that Words now follows. And
so Words is soon letting Music take the lead.
In its written form the words and rhy thms of Beckett’s song recall both
the Yeats of Words for Music Perhaps and the young Stephen Dedalus, who
mourns for his dead mother in Ulysses:
Age is when to a man
Huddled o’er the ingle
Shivering for the hag
To put the pan in the bed
And bring the toddy
She comes in the ashes
Who loved could not be won
Or won not loved
Or some other trouble
Comes in the ashes
Like in that old light
The face in the ashes
That old starlight
On the earth again.
(Collected Shorter Plays 131)The ungainly syntax (“Age is when to a man”) and archaicizing language
(“huddled o’er the ingle”) give Beckett’s poem a parodic edge: old men
shiver, their “hag” brings them the bedpan and toddy, the beautiful girl
emerges from the ashes, her face recalling “that old starlight / On the earth
again.” As such, the poem forces the listener to take each word like “toddy”
separately, refusing the “®ow” of the incorporating stanza. And meanwhile
Music provides no more than an ascending line of plucked piano notes, re-
peated with the accompaniment of the vibraphone and then ®ute, as mini-
mal and separate as the poet’s words. Each monosyllable—“Who loved could
not be won” or “Like in that old light”—has its own life. Like the incisions
made by a sharp instrument, words and musical notes are etched into the
mind.
This, at least, is the response of Croak to what are, after all, his own words
Acoustic Art in Beckett’s Radio Plays 125