Beckett, Samuel
▶ Watch on YouTubeCoverage note: partial (a very short reading of well under a minute; the English auto-captions are noisy and several words and lines are garbled or lost, so only the intelligible shape of the passage is described, with caution; the poem is not reproduced beyond a few short phrases)
Core ideas
A short verse passage read aloud. The extract is a brief, incantatory piece of verse rather than narrative prose. It opens with a question, "who may tell the tale of the old man," and then moves through a litany built on repeated "of the…" phrases: the coming, the beginning, the going from, "the long way of the short stay," the going back home "the way he had come."
Emptiness and wayfaring. The most recognizable motif, repeated twice in the transcript, is a figure with "the empty heart" and "the empty hands," described as a "dim-minded" or "dark-minded" wayfarer stumbling "through barren lands" with dark winds around him, "gone out" of that emptiness. The captions also contain what looks like a refrain about "nothingness in words and clothes," but the lines are too distorted to reconstruct. The overall effect is a stripped, rhythmic lament on journeying and loss, spoken in a flat, repetitive cadence.
Limits of the source. Because of the noisy captions it is not possible to describe Beckett's vocal delivery or to confirm the exact wording of the lines; anyone needing the passage should consult the published text of Watt.
Excerpts
“Who may tell the tale of the old man”
“of the empty heart of the empty hands”
“of the long way of the short stay”