Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates (1935) was written during an exceptionally difficult period in Beckett’s life during which he suffered two bereavements in rapid succession, resulting in the deterioration of his health. The collection, which has its antecedents in poetry ranging from Ovid to Joyce, focuses on the successive metamorphoses of the embodied self, including birth, illness, ageing, death, and decay. Through close readings of a number of the poems, the chapter analyses the ways in which Beckett’s early poetry can be understood as a type of anti-poetry that resists traditional conceptions of the aesthetic as beautiful, as conceptual, and as combining the sensory with the spiritual. The language and imagery of Echo’s Bones, with its refusal of metaphor and its lexical and syntactical resistance to interpretation, also resists the metaphysical consolations of poetry.