dragging his hunger through the sky
of my skull shell of sky and earth

stooping to the prone who must
soon take up their life and walk

mocked by a tissue that may not serve
till hunger earth and sky be offal

According to Lawrence E. Harvey’s Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), Beckett’s early poem was a response to Goethe’s “Harzreise im Winter”:

As a vulture would,
That on heavy clouds of morning
With gentle wing reposing,
Seeks for his prey –
Hover, my song. (Tr. Edwin H. Zeydel)

Harvey contrasts the two poems thusly:

The optimism, expansive joy, and religious mysticism of the original are missing in Beckett’s poem. … “The Vulture” might be called (by a critic) “The Artist on his Art.” It is the most explicit account in Echo’s Bones of the author’s views on the nature of poetry. While the model and its offshoot have in common the theme of artistic creation, even here the views disclosed differ greatly. Goethe’s “Geier” might well be a hawk in search of its prey, for there is nothing in the above lines that suggests the carrion-consuming Accipitridae of science. Even the “heavy clouds” are heavy only in order to furnish a stable resting-place, and the poet’s heart is light. His poem is a song waiting to be born, and its author in his joyful moment of expectant creativity is in the state of poetic grace. There is little doubt that the poem will be born a healthy, happy offspring. Not so with the somber song of Samuel Beckett. (113)