Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy

there in the... no, standing, standing, there on the hearth-rug in the

dark before the ¤re in his old red dressing-gown and no sound in the

house of any kind, only the sound of the ¤re. [Pause.] Standing there

in his old red dressing-gown might go on ¤re any minute like when

he was a child, no, that was his pyjamas, standing there waiting in the

dark, no light, only the light of the ¤re, and no sound of any kind, only

the ¤re, an old man in great trouble. [Pause.] (95, ellipses are Beckett’s)

The dominant feature here is the degree of verbal and phrasal repetition: the
word “¤re” appears eight times in combination with “light” and “sound,”
“only” and “no,” as in “no light, only the light of the ¤re,” “no sound of any
kind, only the ¤re,” and punctuated by the use of “no” as correction: “all the
shutters... no, hangings,” “sitting there in the... no, standing,” “old red
dressing-gown... no, that was his pyjamas.” And “pause” also acts as a kind
of “correction,” for each pause is ¤lled with the sea voice so that “no sound,”
and “not a sound” are not accurate descriptors.
Beckett’s dense network of repetition places a curious burden on the
sparsely used visual images in the passage. So abstract is the vocabulary that
when we are suddenly introduced to the ¤gure “on the hearth-rug in the dark
before the ¤re in his old red dressing-gown,” we hang on to the bright color
image as a kind of signpost in the midst of shadow. Red is also the color of
the ¤re, and then the embers—and phonemically both “red” and “embers”
chime with “Henry,” who is not overtly present at the scene in question.
But the power of visualization, activated momentarily in Henry’s mono-
logue, is repeatedly countered by rhy thm, in this case the broken phrasal
rhy thm of “white world, great trouble, not a sound, only the embers, sound
of dying, dying glow, Holloway, Bolton, Bolton, Holloway, old men, great
trouble, white world, not a sound” (95). The sound structure here, as in many
of Beckett’s later works, is phrasal and linear, with two primary stresses per
line:^13

whíte wórld

greát troúble

nót a soúnd

ónly the émbers

soúnd of dying

dying glów

followed by the chiastic line, “Hóllowày, Bólton | | Bólton, Hóllowày,” and
then the same refrain with the lines in slightly different order:

Acoustic Art in Beckett’s Radio Plays 109