Today’s Poem: Gerontion
After such knowledge, what forgiveness?
Gerontion
by T.S. Eliot
Thou hast nor youth nor age But as it were an after dinner sleep Dreaming of both. Here I am, an old man in a dry month, Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain. I was neither at the hot gates Nor fought in the warm rain Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass, Bitten by flies, fought. My house is a decayed house, And the Jew squats on the window sill, the owner, Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp, Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London. The goat coughs at night in the field overhead; Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds. ◦ stonecrop = a stubby succulent; The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea, merds = pieces of dung Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter. I an old man, A dull head among windy spaces. Signs are taken for wonders. “We would see a sign!” The word within a word, unable to speak a word, Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year Came Christ the tiger In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas, To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk Among whispers; by Mr. Silvero With caressing hands, at Limoges Who walked all night in the next room; By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians; By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room Shifting the candles; Fräulein von Kulp Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door. Vacant shuttles Weave the wind. I have no ghosts, An old man in a draughty house Under a windy knob. After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, Guides us by vanities. Think now She gives when our attention is distracted And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late What’s not believed in, or is still believed, In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon Into weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed with Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree. The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours. Think at last We have not reached conclusion, when I Stiffen in a rented house. Think at last I have not made this show purposelessly And it is not by any concitation ◦ concitation = stirring up; agitation Of the backward devils. I would meet you upon this honestly. I that was near your heart was removed therefrom To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition. I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it Since what is kept must be adulterated? I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch: How should I use it for your closer contact? These with a thousand small deliberations Protract the profit of their chilled delirium, Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled, With pungent sauces, multiply variety In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do Suspend its operations, will the weevil Delay? De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear In fractured atoms. Gull against the wind, in the windy straits Of Belle Isle, or running on the Horn, White feathers in the snow, the Gulf claims, And an old man driven by the Trades To a sleepy corner. Tenants of the house, Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.
Suppose we thought of T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) this way — that there is a visible argument, a progression of thought, that runs through his major poems from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in 1915, through “Gerontion” in 1920, The Waste Land in 1922, “The Hollow Men” in 1925, and on to “Ash Wednesday” in 1930.
The progression would be this:
(1) “Prufrock” is about the personal, in the sense of the persona of the titular figure, with a few images from an empty present age (and the loss of meaning from history’s more heroic ages) used to provide figures for measuring the fatuity of the persona.
So, the evening is “etherized,” in a deflation of Romantic views of sunset. And in the room where “the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo,” the greatness of art is reduced to chitchat. “I am no prophet,” Prufrock admits, and no “Prince Hamlet.” Indeed, in a brutal rhyme, “I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, / And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker.”
(2) Five years later, in “Gerontion,” Eliot offers another persona: “an old man in a dry month, / Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.” But we are given many more images than “Prufrock” offered of an impoverished present and the lost richness of the past — enough that they begin to overwhelm the personal, the metaphor bigger than the thing ostensibly explained by the metaphor. The personality of the little old man (gerontion, in Ancient Greek) is made to seem so much a symptom of his era that he fades more than did Prufrock.
And so, “Gerontion” opens with a reference to the heroic stand of the Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae, by way of explaining what the old man is not. The characters of his era are flawed, weak, and silly — and “Gerontion” gives them names, as fellow dwellers in the old man’s boarding house (or perhaps voices in his head): Mr. Silvero (who had been to Limoges, where once upon a time the ruling dukes of Aquitaine were crowned). And Hakagawa (who goes to the museums, “bowing” at Titians — paintings by an old master, like the Michelangelo that the unnamed women in “Prufrock” speak of). Madame de Tornquist (with her candles, possibly indulging some silly occult practice), and Fräulein von Kulp.
History — especially in the wake of the end of the First World War, which came between “Prufrock” and “Gerontion” — both “Gives too late” and “Gives too soon” (there’s much repetition and parallel grammatical construction in the poem), until “Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices / Are fathered by our heroism.”
(3) Two years after that, we get The Waste Land from Eliot, where the device of a clear central persona is abandoned. The voice is mostly oracular, with a cascade of images of the weakness of the present and lost meaning of the past. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”
(4) Three years later, Eliot offers “The Hollow Men,” which is, in a sense, The Waste Land crushed down to a purity of the oracular. A purity of image. A purity of the sense that the world has thinned into meaninglessness. “We are the hollow men / We are the stuffed men / Leaning together / Headpiece filled with straw”: Where “Gerontion” was narrated by “An old man in a draughty house / Under a windy knob,” given to “Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season,” now we are all that old man, that scarecrow, that dried-up brain.
(5) Then, five years later, we are given “Ash Wednesday.” Eliot has made the abyss of modernity so vast that only God can fill it. And notice the broken repetitions that indicated the shattering of the world in “The Hollow Men,” now signaling some completion beyond language in “Ash Wednesday”: from “For Thine is / Life is / For Thine is the” in “The Hollow Man” to “Because I do not hope to turn again / Because I do not hope / Because I do not hope to turn” in “Ash Wednesday.”
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I find this notion of a continuing argument, a progression of thought, in Eliot’s major poems useful. I also think it’s probably wrong.
Oh, not necessarily wrong in some grand sense, some view from 20,000 feet above, but any descent toward the actual text of the poems weakens the idea, breaking it up with so many questions, counterexamples, and oddities that the storyline falls to bits of dust that blow away.
What are we to do with, for example, “Christ the tiger” in “Gerontion,” who comes to devour rather than forgive? Or the possible gesture toward John Henry Newman’s highly religious 1865 poem The Dream of Gerontius? “’Tis this strange innermost abandonment, . . . / for now it comes again, / That sense of ruin, which is worse than pain, / That masterful negation and collapse.”
We can make too much of the fact that Eliot thought for a while of using “Gerontion” as the opening section of The Waste Land. The poem remains what The Waste Land is not: a Browning-esque dramatic monologue — and I read the repeating of “Think” to open sentences in “Gerontion” as a deliberate echo of the “Thinketh” sentences of Browning’s 1864 “Caliban upon Setebos,” where the meaning is “I think” or “One thinks,” not a command for some other to think.
Eliot’s birthday — September 26 — came this week, and in celebration it’s worth spending some time puzzling through the difficulties of a poem as strong as “Gerontion.” I gave up on the poem when I was younger, deciding it was a failure and not worth an investment of effort. I was wrong. Eliot had reached the fullness of his powers by 1920, and the obscurity of, say, the final images ought to be taken as planned and deliberate. We are supposed to be confused, swept up in the whirlwind of images, lost in cascades of reference as the old man of the poem is lost:
De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled
Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear
In fractured atoms. Gull against the wind, in the windy straits
Of Belle Isle, or running on the Horn,
White feathers in the snow, the Gulf claims,
And an old man driven by the Trades
To a sleepy corner.
And after such knowledge, what forgiveness?
I have to say, of all the poets my friends endlessly rave about, T.S. Eliot is the one I still struggle with the most. I greatly appreciate your elucidating essays.
Thank you, Joseph. Fine analysis. My intuition is that phase two Eliot is something like: only forgiveness, after such knowledge.