Samuel Beckett's Dublin

By Donald Davie 1922–1995 Donald Davie

When it is cold it stinks, and not till then.

The seasonable or more rabid heats

Of love and summer in some other cities

Unseal the all too human: not in his.

When it is cold it stinks, but not before;

Smells to high heaven then most creaturely

When it is cold. It stinks, but not before

His freezing eye has done its best to maim,

To amputate limbs, livelihood and name,

Abstracting life beyond all likelihood.

When it is cold it stinks, and not till then

Can it be fragrant. On canal and street,

Colder and colder, Murphy to Molloy,

The weather hardens round the Idiot Boy,

The gleeful hero of the long retreat.

When he is cold he stinks, but not before,

This living corpse. The existential weather

Smells out in these abortive minims, men

Who barely living therefore altogether

Live till they die; and sweetly smell till then.

Source: Selected Poems (Carcanet Press Ltd, 1985)

Biography

Donald Davie was born in Barnsley, Yorkshire, to George Clarke and Alice Sugden Davie, received his early education at Barnsley Holgate Grammar School, and spent his boyhood in “the industrially ravaged landscape,” as he called it, of the West Riding. As a Northerner, he has said that in literature he grew to like “the spare and lean.” From his mother, who had a liking for poetry and knew, according to Davie, “the greater part, . . .

Continue reading this biography