Poem

‘The Shuttle of a Ripening Egg Combs the Warp of His Days’:
ON THE ENDNOTES GIVEN BY SAMUEL BECKETT
TO HIS POEM ‘WHOROSCOPE’ (1930)



I like these notes even though
they really do little to explain.
In fact, these notes read
as if they were lines
deleted from the poem itself.
'Saint Augustine has a revelation
in the shrubbery and reads St. Paul.'
Shrubbery being a word
the novelist Nicholson Baker
doesn’t like. And this one:
‘He proves God by exhaustion.’
Which is an interesting idea
and very interesting line.
And this final sadness
plainly stated and more sad
for being so plainly stated:
‘His daughter died of scarlet fever
at the age of six.’ Imagine that.
How terrible facts can be.