As if predicting his career’s trajectory, Samuel Beckett’s letter to Nuala Costello of 10 May 1934 begins with the erudite mania that marked his early style and ends with the solemn reticence which would make him famous. It begins:It flows on for several pages with eddies like, ‘the whole thing was very Hugo, Hugo at his most Asti. Not Lautréamont, Lautréaval. Pauvres Gens oxygenated’, before arriving at the strikingly restrained ‘Up he went’, a poem for which Beckett seems never to have sought publication, which he follows with a brief valediction:The energy and superfluity of the Joycean passes into a bleak refinement at first playful and then foreboding: it ends in the mature Beckettian style. And Beckett offers it a captivating name, ‘gnomic’, recalling the title of a poem formally and topically similar to this one, ‘Gnome’, which he did publish, two months later in Dublin Magazine. If the prose opening the letter recalls what Christopher Ricks has written of Beckett’s early poetry, that it is ‘[c]lotted, coagulated, corrugated, rhythmically unhearable’, while, ‘erudite beyond belief and beyond impingement’, the poem that ends this letter is by marked contrast polished, rhythmically conspicuous and without obvious erudition.4 ‘Up he went’ finds its depths not by constellating allusions outside of itself, but by mining downward, into the idiomatic stratum of our language. It opens with the idioms of beginning and ending a university education: to go up, and to come down. To pass someone in can mean ‘to gain admittance’ for them, while to pass in means to die (an abridgement of ‘pass in one’s marble’ or to ‘pass in one’s cheques’.)5 The most basic of English verbs, go, come and pass, take us wittily from school to grave. Rematriculate further deepens the matter: as Steven Connor puts it, the word connects ‘passing through and coming down to bodily processes, of birth, defecation and other kinds of academic and corporal expulsion’.6 Its concluding ‘for ever’ innocuously completes the rhyme of the industrious ‘endeavour’, but in so doing also emphasises that rematriculation marks death. It is a death that is a return, punning on the return to sheer material whose root, like matriculate, is mater or mother.7