‘Poèmes 1937–1939’, if in certain ways slight, nevertheless occupies a significant place in Beckett’s evolution as a writer. As we shall see, in very reduced form these poems begin to work through many of the questions which will become central to the later prose, while also approaching them from slightly different angles. By way of a lyric form and the French language, in some ways ‘Poèmes 1937–1939’ mediate between the early English fiction and the French prose to come as much as between the early English poetry and Beckett’s later work. Notably, as against the learned and allusive sprawl so characteristic of the early work, in ‘Poèmes 1937–1939’ we begin to see hints of the use of structural, modular permutation, pivotal not only for works like Quad or Watt, but also for Molloy with its two halves, or the logic of the pseudo-couples, which are built around a dialectic of opposition on the one hand and substitutability on the other. As the opening poem of the sequence already indicates, the ‘Poèmes’ figure as an early instance of what would become one of Beckett’s most enduring questions, to wit, that of the relationship between difference and sameness.1 For Beckett, at stake is both the sameness of difference and the difference of sameness, and here this is played out in four crucial arenas governed by these relationships: male and female, human and animal, inside and outside, and what can only be called self and self.