Thought, Form, Gerontion
Thought, Form, Gerontion
Thought, Form, Gerontion
The Four Quartets, despite their extensive use of symbolist techniques, are
also generally acknowledged to be poetry of thought ; they make assertions,
offer doctrine. Passages of intensely evoked images are juxtaposed to
discursive — at times almost prose-like — meditation and philosophic
statement. 1 Though this method is most fully developed in the Quartets, it
is not unique to them but is clearly anticipated in earlier religious poems.
The first poem of Ash Wednesday is developed in the form of a logical
argument and shares, with poems V and VI, passages resembling discursive
sections of the Quartets. The first movement of V, for example, is comparable
to the opening of 'Burnt Norton'; abstract, meditative, and philosophic,
both rely primarily on rhythm, pacing and recurrent patterns for effect.
'Journey of the Magi' ends in direct statement, an explanation of the meaning
inherent in its preceding images, and 'Animula' is as 'prosey' — and as in-
effectively so — as the overtly discursive second part of 'The Dry Salvages'
II. 'Gerontion' as well, though earlier and more consistently symbolist, is to
some extent poetry of thought. All poems, of course, 'mean', though it may
not be possible to state their meaning in discursive terms, and perhaps no
poem's full meaning can be so stated. In this context 'poetry of thought' is
that which offers ideas and concepts directly as well as through image or
symbol.
'Gerontion's' complexity results from a fusion of emotional, moral and
intellectual components, the latter partly articulated in discursive language.
Analysis of any one component helps to illuminate the poem, but a rich
understanding depends on clarifying their relationship and the relationship,
if any, between history, the Incarnation, physical and moral sterility,
mental distraction and a sense of terror. The need to recognize and account
for the poem's underlying ideas, especially as they affect its overall structure,
is greater because of the frequent assumption that it consists entirely of
discrete and non-rational musings held together only by the somewhat
indefinable presence which is Gerontion's mind.
Elisabeth Schneider, in T. S. Eliot : The Pattern in the Carpet, cogently
remarks that although 'Gerontion' may be meant to look like the '"free
1
F. R. Leavis goes so far as to say that Four Quartets, since they offer thought,
aspire to general validity. The Living Principle : 'English' as a Discipline of Thought
(New York, 1975), p. 159. But the importance of the ideas in the poem is acknow-
ledged not only implicitly by the quantity of criticism seeking an 'approach to the
meaning', but in the recognition that their nature and merit are inseparable from
what they say. See, for example, Graham Hough, 'Vision and Doctrine in Four
Quartets', CritQ, XV, 2 (Summer 1973), 108-27.
237
association" that preoccupied many psychologists at the time', it is neither
chaos nor pure mood, for 'floating along on mood, one encounters at the
center a rock of rational statement and suddenly realizes that the succession
of images is not at all "free"'.2 But the frequently accepted view that they
are 'free' or wholly without logical continuity3 does have some basis ; Geron-
tion's thoughts, obsessive reiterations of his moral and emotional dilemma,
have no rational structure. But although the poem consists of Gerontion's
thoughts, it is a selection and arrangement of them in a logical pattern: it
moves from his self absorption and compulsive self analysis towards a
crystallization of meaning — a statement of his personal and historic plight
in clear, rational terms — and dissolves again into terror. This terror Schnei-
der considers a flaw in the poem, an emotion without an objective correl-
ative,4 but it is the direct consequence of both the structure she recognizes
and the theme of the poem. Tight poetic form combines with disjointed
fragments of thought to reflect the poem's dual meaning. While a concept
of time and history underlies 'Gerontion', the poem is also a very personal
articulation of suffering. Whether it is personal to Eliot or only to Gerontion
does not matter; it is about suffering of a special and terrible kind. The
rational structure of the poem embodies the non-rational terror of a 'little
old man' who sees in the decay of history the meaning of his own decay.
Gerontion's dilemma is, I think, new in Eliot's poetry, differing in im-
portant ways from that of earlier characters. It has become a commonplace
that Gerontion is an aged Prufrock, but though he shares with Prufrock a
peculiar slightness of personality, a presence made up of the accumulated
sensations, feelings, attitudes and fears representing a declining age, he is,
in more important ways, quite distinct. For each does have personal charac-
teristics. We know that Prufrock lives in a city, is of a certain middling age,
and has spent much of his life partaking of tea and cakes and shallow talk,
that he walks through seedy parts of town and contemplates his own
failure of will. We know that he wishes to act or choose in some fundamental
and daring way and cannot. And we know that this failure causes him acute
nervous sensitivity, at times despair. Gerontion is not a man who looks
back on such failure. For Prufrock is capable of intense and delicate percep-
2
Elisabeth Schneider, T. S. Eliot : The Pattern in the Carpet (Berkeley, 1975), pp. 47-8.
3
F. R. Leavis stated that 'Gerontion' has '... neither narrative nor logical continuity,
and the only theatre in which the characters mentioned come together, or could, is
the mind of the old man'. New Bearings in English Poetry : A Study of the Contem-
porary Situation, Ann Arbor Paperback ed. (1932; repr. Ann Arbor, 1960), p. 84.
This assumption is shared by many commentators. That the poem is made up of
'movements' or related blocks of images is recognized but not that these form an
organized pattern.
4
In this view she agrees with Grover Smith, who also applies Eliot's statement about
Hamlet to Gerontion. Smith blames this flaw on a split between Gerontion's per-
sonality and 'the argument, which is not intimately enough related to the old man's
feelings'. T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays : A Study in Sources and Meaning (Chicago,
1956), pp. 64-5. It is the very intimate relation of this personality and argument
that I wish to demonstrate.
238
tions, 'Arms that are braceleted and white and bare/[But in the lamplight,
downed with light brown hair!]', 'music from a farther room', mermaids sing-
ing and riding seaward on the waves. He moves toward a moment of crisis,
climbs a stair — even if only in imagination. He fails, and his suffering is
longing, loneliness, unfulfilled desire — whether for friendship, love or even
God. But Gerontion, though he too is a zone of acute nervous sensitivity,
preoccupied with loss and failure, does not share Prufrock's perceptions, nor
does it seem he ever has. He resembles Prufrock less than the narrator of
'Portrait of a Lady', whose lack of overt human will and action conceals
not paralyzed desire but emptiness. Gerontion, more intelligent and aware,
is equally devoid of emotional experience ; his suffering is not the pain of
loss but the terror of nothingness, a secular (and therefore hopeless) dark
night of the soul. We learn more of him from looking forward to Ash Wednes-
day than backward to 'Prufrock', for his moral and emotional state is
desiccation. The experience of the dark night of the soul is often compared
by mystics to being eaten by a large animal, and as the narrator of Ash
Wednesday is eaten by leopards, Gerontion is devoured by a tiger ; his will
is small and dry, he sits still, but he has neither memory of desire nor vision
of salvation.
An unusual characteristic of 'Gerontion' is its lack of what Leonard
Unger called Eliot's 'images of awareness', those persistent patterns of image
suggesting realization: water, stairs, eyes, flowers, human hair, music, smell,
times of the year or seasons. To the extent they occur, they are wholly
negative. Gerontion is in a dry month waiting for rain, and he thinks, in
the end, of the windy straits or running on the Horn. But unlike 'Prufrock',
The Waste Land, A sh Wednesday, or Four Quartets, or most other poems, there
is no opposing water of renewal, neither promise of rain, nor fountains, nor
pools of water out of sunlight. Gerontion recalls no sensuous brown hair,
has looked into no eyes, has climbed no stair. Gerontion thinks; he does not
feel. He has lost all sensual awareness. He describes himself as 'a dull head
among windy spaces', and his 'head' is all we know. The one very familiar
Eliot image which does recur throughout 'Gerontion' is this wind, image of
aimless motion that blows through 'Rhapsody on a Windy Night' and in
'Preludes' wraps the grimy scraps of withered leaves about your feet; that
blows through the Chapel Perilous and through the dry grass with the sound
of our whispers in 'The Hollow Men'. The wind is a constant symbol of
emptiness, and Gerontion repeats three times that he is in the wind. What
endlessly revolves in his mind is neither what he has or may or will do or
feel but what he never did and cannot feel and has no hope of feeling. Far
more than Prufrock, he is one of the living dead, having 'nor youth nor age/
But as it were an after dinner sleep/ Dreaming of both'. Gerontion, having
lost 'sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch', has no life, and the quality of
his suffering determines the structure of the poem, its parallel of personal
and historic failure and its core of rational statement in the midst of 'a heap
of broken images'.
At the poem's center is an analysis of the meaning of history, that 'rock
239
of rational statement' around which the seemingly random images form.
The poem builds toward that analysis through a series of images embodying
the reasons for Gerontion's dilemma; they lead not to a resolution but to
more intense efforts at justification and explanation and to a final dissolution
in physical chaos and mental nullity. It is like the compulsive reiterated
thought of the depressive who, in the end, withdraws to 'a sleepy corner', a
place of hiding. The intellectual core of the poem is the analysis of history.
The moral core is an analysis of a personal and historic void. The emotional
core is terror, the terror of being and feeling nothing but knowing that
there is something to be and feel. The void and the terror are comprehensible
only through the conception of history, a conception based on a funda-
mental ieligious problem: though a sign was given, though Christ was born,
Gerontion finds himself spiritually and emotionally barren, devoid of faith,
incapable of passion. If, as Eliot remarked in an essay on Pound, the 'present
is no more than the present existence, the present significance of the entire
past ...', 5 how have we come from Antony to Bleistein, from Theseus to
Sweeney? And why is Gerontion, despite his knowledge, without forgiveness,
'a dry brain in a dry season', having lost beauty in terror and terror in
inquisition? The answer arises partly from the structure of the poem which,
though seemingly random, has implicit rational connections even between
the most abrupt juxtapositions, and which moves toward and then away
from the discursive center. Beginning with Gerontion's description of his
present moral and mental state, the poem shifts abruptly to the historical
cause of that state, then to his analysis of the meaning of history. In the
two final sections he contemplates the significance of this knowledge and
restates his own position. Gerontion's preoccupation with the past and its
effect on his own life is revealed through allusions, two being especially
important. Together they express the poem's union of sterility and terror,
both personal and universal. The references to Lancelot Andrewes' 1618
Nativity sermon and the recreation of Middleton's rhythm and phrasing in
The Changeling are well known. But the way they are used and their full
significance have not, I think, been fully explored. Eliot's allusions are
frequently illuminating not only for their immediate setting but for the
entire context from which they come. In 'Gerontion' this is especially true.
The allusions to Andrewes and to Middleton are placed immediately before
and after the rational core of statement. The first draws on a sermon whose
entire theme is the nature of man's failure to recognize Christ ; the second
evokes, through Beatrice's realization of her nature and her crime, Geron-
tion's realization of what he is and why. The first allusion is followed by an
image of the tiger come to be devoured. The second is preceded by an image
of the tiger come to devour. Thus the shift from Christ as sacrifice to Christ
as avenger pivots on Gerontion's view of history. Preceding and succeeding
these three passages are Gerontion's meditations on his present state, which
begin in waiting and end in violent destruction.
5
T. S. Eliot, 'The Method of Mr. Pound', rev. of Quia Pauper Amavi, by Ezra Pound,
Athenaeum, No. 4669 (Oct. 24, 1919), p. 1065.
240
The passage alluding to Lancelot Andrewes abruptly follows Gerontion's
description of his own present condition. The opening lines draw together
past and present, both real and potential. The past, Gerontion suggests,
contained heroic action, but he did not act and no longer can. He does not
contemplate the daring act of Prufrock — surrender to another in hopes of
answering some overwhelming question — nor does he recall hyacinth girls
or Paris in the spring. Like the narrator of 'Portrait of a Lady', he confines
even his memory to public event ; he himself has nothing, neither desire nor
satiety, hope nor memory of human or spiritual love. He does contemplate
heroic action, which he also has not had. His 'house' is an accumulation of
impersonal continental places — perhaps the origins of those empty gestures
with names, Mr. Silvero, Hakagawa, Madame de Tornquist, Fräulein von
Kulp — and his immediate surroundings are rocks, metal, feces and a goat
that coughs. 'The woman' has even less existence than Prufrock's lady; she
only pokes, sneezes, and keeps the kitchen. Gerontion's persistent negation
diners from that of Eliot's other characters not because it is negation but
because it exists with no contrasting poignant possibilities, no suggestions
of awareness except awareness of his own negation.
The second passage, though an abrupt shift of thought, fits in a clear
poetic movement to past reasons for the present situation :
Signs are taken for wonders, 'We would see a sign!'
The word within a word, unable to speak a word,
Swaddled with darkness.
The source in Andrewes' sermon reads: 'Signes are taken for wonders:
(Master we would faine see a Signe, that is, a miracle). And, in this sense, it is
a Signe, to wonder at. Indeed, every word (heer) is a wonder: To βρέφος an
infant; Verbum infans, the Word without a word; the aeternall Word not
hable to speake a word;' .* The tone is one of wonder, amazement at this
Word with no word. When viewed in relation to the whole 1618 Nativity
sermon, these lines suggest far more for Gerontion than mere doubt or even
the wish for a sign of salvation. They suggest why, despite the very presence
of the sign, Gerontion is caught in a sensual and spiritual void. The main
theme of that sermon is expressed in the following lines : Ί . The worke of the
day is invenietis, to find Christ. We shall not be the better for natus est, if we
find Him not. Find Him we cannot, if (first) we find not a Signe to find Him
by. Erit vobis Signum, and Hoc erit (saith the Angelí) a Signe ye shall have ;
and this shall be it: Ye shall find Him swadled, and laid in a manger'.'' The
sermon is carefully organized around several main points, of which the
following are important : that Christ is born but as good not born if not found
{Borne He may be, before; but, nobis, natus, to us He is borne, when to us
He is knowne, when we find Him ; and not before. Christus inventus is more
241
than Christus natus') ;8 that to find him we must have a sign ('So come we
from Christus natus, to Christus signatus. ... I. Their wish is honest and
good: And pitie, any that seeks Christ should want a signe, to find Him by:
the Angell will not suffer that ;') ;9 and that the sign given is so poor that men
find it hard to believe ('For, this Signe, they know not what to make of it ;
It is so poore a one, it is enough, to make them hälfe in the mind to give
over their journey, as not caring for invenietis, whether they find Him or
no:'). 10 I have quoted Andrewes at length because this context implies a
meaning beyond and different from that of the lines in isolation. The demand
for a sign, even with the doubt it implies, is not in itself wrong. What
matters is that the sign, rightly desired, was given but rejected or denied.
This makes the issue personal guilt ; we would have Christ in a better state,
not in the way given. Gerontion lacks a sign, not because there is none but
because it is not found. He has given over his journey, as not caring for
invenietis. The 'doctrine' underlying this poem is that although the Incar-
nation, having occurred, gives meaning to history, for Gerontion, and by
extension modern man, that meaning exists objectively but not subjectively.
Gerontion's obsessive questioning is an attempt to understand that failure
of subjective meaning: is it personal or universal? The whole paragraph
from which Andrewes' passage is taken stresses the amazing fact that this
unspeaking infant in a lonely manger with beasts is God. The very nature of
the sign creates doubt. Is Gerontion's moral condition a personal guilt or a
failure of history, and in either case how can he change it? All this underlies
the passage leading to an analysis of history as deception.
Following the image of the unspeaking and hidden word is the image of
Christ the tiger. This is generally compared to Blake's tyger, and certainly
it implies the vengeful aspect of God. Another sermon by Lancelot Andrewes,
that from which the opening of 'Journey of the Magi' is taken, provides a
more suggestive source. Clearly this sermon had an impact on Eliot, for he
not only used it in that poem but mentioned it at least twice elsewhere. He
was struck by a particular phrase which he quoted in the Athenaeum in
191911 and which he later commented on in 'Lancelot Andrewes'. 'Christ is
no wild-cat. What talk ye of twelve days?' is one of the phrases which 'do
not desert us'. 12 Grover Smith denies the significance of the parallel because,
he says, 'Andrewes' context is hardly analogous'.13 But the context seems,
in fact, to be closely related and particularly illuminating in conjunction
with the first sermon. Andrewes, theme is our failure to seek Christ or even
accept Him. He contrasts our laxity with the vital faith of the wise men
8
Ibid., p. 76.
9 Ibid., p. 76.
10 Ibid., p. 80.
11
T. S. Eliot, 'The New Elizabethans and the Old', rev. of The New Elizabethans : A
Selection of the Lives of Young Men Who Have Fallen in the Great War, by E. B. Osborn,
Athenaeum, No. 4640 (April 4, 1919), p. 135.
12
13
T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, new ed. (New York, 1950), p. 307.
Smith, p. 31 On.
242
who undertook so harsh a journey while we await easier ways: 'With them,
it was but Vidimus, Venimus: With us, it would have been but Veniemus
at most. Our fashion is, to see and see againe, before we stirre a foot:
Specially, if it be to the worship of Christ. Come such a Journey, at such a
time? No: but fairely have put it off to the Spring of the yeare, till the
dayes longer, and the waies fairer, and the weather warmer; til better trav-
ailing to Christ. Our Epiphanie would (sure) have fallen in Easter-weeke at
the soonest'.14 The desire to put off Christ until spring suggests not only
why May is depraved, but why Christ becomes the tiger. Andrewes presses
the point of our love of ease with the striking line already mentioned : 'But,
when we do it, we must be allowed leisure. Ever, Veniemus ; never Venimus :
Ever, comming; never, come. We love to make no very great haste. To other
things, perhapps: Not, to Adorare, the Place of the worship of God. Why
should we? Christ, is no wild catt. What talke you of twelve dayes? And it
be jvrtie days hence, ye shall be sure to finde His Mother and Him; She
cannot be churched till then: What needes such haste?' 15 The point is ironic.
Thinking Christ is no wild cat, we put off until spring our seeking, but by
spring Christ is a wild cat indeed. The vengeful God appears because the
innocent child is denied. The association of spring with luxurious depravity
provides another interesting parallel, for both Andrewes and Henry Adams,
to whom Eliot alludes in the next line, dwell on the warmth and ease and
seductive beauty of spring. Adams' description closes with these lines : 'No
European spring had shown him the same intermixture of delicate grace and
passionate depravity that marked the Maryland May. He loved it too much,
as though it were Greek and half human'.16
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.
Looking again at the lines together, we find an incredible compression of
meaning. Seeking, rightly, a sign, humankind is given the Word, but un-
speaking and hidden. Those who lack the faith to seek Christ actively delay
their search until the ease of spring, but the wild cat man ignores appears in
the depraved May for which he waits. For Gerontion, then, failure is not
absolute denial of Christ but feeble and warped recognition without passion,
the furtive gestures of depersonalized names, his own agitated thoughts
divorced from act or will or even desire. But fear remains, focussed on the
constant question of guilt: whose is the failure? The Word did appear; the
sign was given; and the wise men, at least, believed, but still the birth was
strangely unlike what one could have expected. In Andrewes' words, 'It
goes hard, this'.
14
'Sermon 15 Of the Nativitie: Christmas 1622', in Sermons, p. 110.
15 Ibid., p. 111.
16
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Boston, 1961), p. 268.
243
The first lines of Gerontion's meditation on history contain the paradox
underlying all that precedes them. This discursive passage, the poem's center,
explains and justifies both the strangely violent and mysterious images
surrounding the 'sign' and the succeeding reiteration of loss and destruction
ending in chaos :
After such knowledge, what forgiveness ? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities.
244
The whole passage on history is often compared to ideas in The Education
of Henry Adams. Although Eliot's 1919 review of the book ignores Adams'
historical views, Adams' comments on the increasing complexity and con-
fusion of human affairs do afford an interesting parallel to Eliot's 'contrived
corridors' and 'cunning passages'. A parallel more significant to the poem's
central theme is Adams' remark on the failure of the Virgin : 'The Virgin
herself never looked so winning — so One — as in this scandalous
failure of her Grace. To what purpose had she existed, if, after nineteen
hundred years, the world was bloodier than when she was born? The stupen-
dous failure of Christianity tortured history'.17 The same idea from Bishop
Andrewes' point of view was a personal damnation. 'We shall not be the
better for natus est, if we find Him not'. For Gerontion only the failure is
certain, whether history's or his own is unclear. Nor can he end his ceaseless
questioning: 'Think at last/ We have not reached conclusion, when 1/
Stiffen in a rented house ...'. Yet the final statement on Christ is that he
springs and devours, and Gerontion's 'rock of rational statement' leads only
to compulsive, reiterated self-justification. His thoughts turn back on
himself, on his own physical, moral and emotional condition — 'when 1/
Stiffen in a rented house'. Yet he does not deny the possibility of a relation
with God:
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
Of the backward devils.
To be removed from Christ, he had once to have been near him even if not
knowing it. Memory, both personal and historic, haunts him with its
reminder of failed potential.
The whole poem suggests sexual frustration as well as religious loss. But
it evokes the frustration of physical desire only, not human love, an emotion
of which Gerontion shows neither awareness nor capability. The images he
contemplates most clearly and intensely are religious — Christ, the Word,
communion. Yet his impotence is the extreme of human separation from
permanent values which give meaning to all of life. Gerontion says he was
removed from 'your heart' which has been variously read as Christ or a
woman. In a sense it is both. Eliot once wrote in a letter to Bonamy Dobrée
that although ordinary human affection cannot lead men to God, 'the love
of God is capable of informing, intensifying and elevating our human
affections, which otherwise have little to distinguish them from the "natural"
affections of animals'.18 Considering the goat's cough, Gerontion's lost sen-
suality seems to embody this idea. More to the point, Gerontion never even
17
Ibid., p. 472.
18
Quoted in Bonamy Dobrée, 'T. S. Eliot: A Personal Reminiscence', in T. S. Eliot :
The Man and His Work, ed. Allen Tate (New York, 1966), p. 81.
245
recalls love; he only asserts that his senses are lost. Animal sexuality declines
with the decay of sense, but spiritual love, which remains, exists only in
relation to God:
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 them for your closer contact?
Far from being 'outside the scope of the poem',19 'terror and inquisition'
are its inevitable emotional center — terror of nothingness, of aridity itself,
self-inquisition of the causes of aridity. Far more terrible than the pain of
great feeling is the terror of feeling nothing. And the terror of aridity is
intensified by the guilt of having failed to act or feel, for in acting and
feeling exists morality. It is not surprising that Eliot chose the souls in
Dante's vestibule to characterize The Waste Land and reiterated the terror
of nothingness in 'The Hollow Men'. It is for this reason that the allusion to
The Changeling is not only particularly appropriate here but more important
for both theme and structure than is acknowledged when Middleton's
phrasing and rhythms are noted. Eliot considered the most significant
aspect of The Changeling to be Beatrice's 'frightful discovery of morality',20
which she reveals in the corresponding lines. Gerontion, too, has made this
frightful discovery when, as for Beatrice, it is already too late. Unlike her,
he lived past the terror and lost even that in ceaseless self-questioning. The
choice of 'inquisition' is exactly right, for his life is self-torture with no
likely end but death. His impotent decay is unlike Beatrice's passionate
action, but both stem from ignoring moral truth until they are destroyed
by it, in Gerontion's case, 'devoured' in the dark night which is both aridity
and a feeling of being eaten, picked to dry bones but finding in that dryness
no peace. The fourth section, in its increasing personal guilt and fear and
futility, builds towards the poem's violent climax, working now outward
from the discursive core to the whirling periphery of discrete images of
destruction. Yet these images are not the conclusion. The passage containing
them has also been compared to Henry Adams' view of history as irrational
force.21 Eliot's own writing does little to justify this view; his prose of
1919-23, for example, consistently presents history not simply as the turbu-
lent movement of force but as the record of both change and permanence.
If man is caught in chaos, it is not because history lacks moral absolutes
but because man is blind to them, whether through history's deception or
19 Schneider, p. 53.
20
'Thomas Middleton', in Selected Essays, p. 142.
21
Harvey Gross, for example, uses Adams' view of history as a basis for interpreting
the whole poem. He claims that for Eliot, as for Adams, history 'is energy, force,
physical vitality', and that the poem 'ends with a burst of natural violence'. '"Geron-
tion" and the Meaning of History', PMLA, LXXVIII (1958), repr. in A Casebook
on 'Gerontion', ed. E. San Juan, Jr. (Columbus, Ohio, 1970), pp. 51-2.
246
his own moral failure. Equally important for the poem's theme and structure
is that it does not, in fact, end in natural violence; it ends 'Not with a bang
but a whimper'. Gerontion imagines a bang, the violent conclusion of a life
of active evil, but he ends in a sleepy corner. The bang is but the thought
of 'a dry brain in a dry season'. The poem returns to restless, chaotic thought
in a withered, desensitized body, thought which, despite its agitation, is the
dry, sterile, agitation of the morally and emotionally empty.
Gerontion's mental violence follows inevitably from the argument of the
poem's rational center. Eliot did not accept Henry Adams' view that 'Chaos
was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man'. Order, for Eliot, is the
timeless truth within nature. By ignoring this permanent order man is left
in the chaos which is nature without it or, as is Gerontion, in the void which
is mere obsessive contemplation of the chaos and the reasons for it. What
Gerontion dwells on in his burst of mental agitation is not the irrational
force of history but his own 'chilled delirium' and the physical destruction
of those, like De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whose lives seem associated
with positive vacuity. Fresca, at least, can probably be identified with the
object of Eliot's Augustan satire in the manuscript version of 'The Fire
Sermon', one whose life is active but unthinking triviality. And all three
are juxtaposed to lower life forms, the spider and weevil. This association
emphasizes physical destruction; those who live only physical lives die only
physical deaths. Like the gull they are driven by the wind and claimed by
the gulf. Gerontion lives no life, neither physical nor spiritual, and his end
is no burst of violence but withdrawal to a sleepy corner, neither life nor
death. His concern is not with history's irrational force but with his own
confusion as to its meaning. The physical chaos is an externalization of inner
terror, Gerontion's thoughts gone out of control, that control momentarily
achieved at the poem's center only to clarify and illuminate a moral state of
utter hopelessness, a center that cannot hold. But it is Gerontion's thoughts,
not the history he contemplates, which cannot retain rational structure.
The paradox of his terror and aridity reflects the paradox of a history filled
with meaning but empty to the very human spirit for whom its meaning exists.
The structure of 'Gerontion', then, is a complex union of seemingly
discrete images with a tight poetic pattern, a pattern revealing the relation
between Gerontion and history. The poem's intellectual core forms a ground
on which Gerontion's self-inquisition is based. The union of sterility with
potential renewal of life creates an objective correlative for moral emptiness
and mental terror. Gerontion's condition is neither passion nor peace, sense
nor spirit, good nor evil, not even the pretense of Mr. Silvero or Fräulein
von Kulp. He is the ultimate inmate of Dante's vestibule. It is perhaps for
this reason that the primary image is whirling wind like that in which
Dante's 'nearly soulless' souls circle without end.22
22 Dante, The Inferno, trans. John Ciardi, Mentor Books (New York, 1954), p. 42.
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