It can be expected that when a novelist-playwright like Beckett, whose subject matter deals with lack of communication and absurdity, turns to poetry, his already intense style will seem exaggerated. We are not surprised when we find that Beckett has written only a handful of poems because we know the intensity of feeling each must contain when only one, sometimes two, are produced in a year. In the same way we should not be surprised by Beckett's somewhat exaggerated poetic style.

Beckett's poems in French reflect this same style, with a few modifications geared to linguistic subtleties. In any case, if there is a slight stylistic difference, the effect does not diminish the most important thing--the poignant quality we know so well in Beckett's English works. The following poem and its translation were written between the years of 1937 and 1938 after Beckett had made his home in France:

they come

different and the same

with each it is different and the same

with each the absence of love is different

with each the absence of love is the same

These poems reveal a poet capable not only of subtle expression in two languages but a poet who has taken from each language and given to the other in his poems.

Finally, Beckett's translations of important French poets such as Eluard, Rimbaud, and Apollinaire are not only valuable literary pieces but works which provide a valuable insight into Beckett himself. Balanced and accurate, they are fine poems in their own right; his translation of Rimbaud's "Drunken Boat":

Downstream on impassive rivers suddenly

I felt the towline of the boatmen slacken

Redskins had taken them in a scream and

stripped them and

Skewered them to the slaving stakes for targets

Then, delivered from any straining boatmen

From the trivial racket of trivial crews and from

The freights of Flemish grain and English cotton

I made my own course down the passive views

These collected poems are consistent with Beckett's other works. The subject matter, though a bit more personal, is just as poignant and profound, and there is not much change reflected in "Thither" written in 1976 as compared to "Gnome" written in 1934. As Beckett said in Waiting for Godot, "Nothing ever changes, it's always the same."