A POEM BY SAMUEL BECKETT

This essay presents a liberal hermeneutic study commenting freely on Samuel Beckett's poem Saint-Lo. Written in 1946 after the devastating Allied bombings that transformed the ancient town in Lower Normandy into a "capital of ruins", this poem marks a rupture and simultaneous beginning of a new, mature period in Beckett's work. As an Irish Red Cross volunteer in 1945, Beckett worked as a translator at a military hospital in Saint-Lo; in his eyes, the utterly devastated town: became a symbol of the collapse of rationality and the cogito.