...but the clouds...

... but the clouds ... is a television play by Samuel Beckett. Beckett wrote it between October–November 1976 “to replace a film of Play which the BBC had sent [him] for approval (and which he had rejected)” due to “the poor quality of the film”. Donald McWhinnie directed Billie Whitelaw and Ronald Pickup. It was first broadcast on 17 April 1977 as part of a programme of three Beckett plays entitled ‘Shades’ on BBC2. It was first published in Ends and Odds (Faber) 1977. An early title for the piece was Poetry only love.

The title comes from a phrase from the last verse of Yeats’s near-solipsist poem, The Tower:

Several months after the McWhinnie production in which he was himself heavily involved, Beckett had the opportunity to act as his own director in the German version, Nur noch Gewölk, for Süddeutscher Rundfunk. In this production he made one or two minor changes but the main one was to include the whole last stanza above rather than the four lines in the original.

“The Tower is a work which discusses history and the past not only in terms of recollection but also as an entire complex of traces, remainders and legacies of which individual subjective memory is only one element.”

“The painful, highly personal question raised by Yeats is: if the poet’s physical powers fail, if his vision and hearing are impaired, can the memory of the sensory world serve as a basis for poetry? Is memory alone capable of stimulating the creative act? … As he draws upon his memory, revisiting scenes both in his life and works, he comes to respond affirmatively to the pessimistic question first raised … The poet’s physical impairments, paradoxically, prove a blessing. Indeed, in the stanza from which Beckett derived his title, Yeats puts the real world in perspective, thereby reducing his own sense of loss.” In a personal communication Beckett told Eoin O’Brien that this was one of Yeats’s greatest lines.

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Wikipedia