Gerontion, 1919
Gerontion is derived from
the Greek word Geran, means little
old man. The central character in the poem is a decayed old man, a suitable
representative of the panorama of futility and anarchy of contemporary
civilization. Originally the poem formed a part of The Waste Land, but on the suggestion of Ezra Pound it was cut out
and made into a separate poem. The Epigraph comes from Shakespeare’s Measure
for Measure. The Duke tells Claudio of the vanity and futility of human life
and advises him to welcome death rather than avoid it. Eliot’s poem expresses
the futility of the civilization which Gerontion represents.
The
poem opens with a description, concrete and elaborate, of Gerontion’s situation
and environment. He is an old man, being read a Samson-like, as a boy. It is a
dry month and he is waiting for rain. The dryness symbolizes not only the
spiritual barrenness of Gerontion but also of the civilization which he
represents. He is waiting for the rain of divine grace. It is the predicament
of a disbeliever whose life is devoid of faith. He is not at all a heroic
figure. He has never fought in any wars ancient or modern. He is entirely
unlike the great heroes who fought in the life-giving rain, heaving a cutlass.
He is quite disillusioned as regards himself and the civilization which he
stands for. He knows that he is, “merely a dull head among windy spaces”
The
contemporary degeneration
The
setting of environment of the poem is felt by assessing the standards of life
of the old man. The house he lives in is
a decayed house symbolizing contemporary decay and desolation. A Jew is the
owner of his house, and he squats on the window sill. Obviously, the Jew
symbolizes the modern commercial civilization, and his squatting like a bird of
prey, brings out the hard heartedness of money relationships. Humanity is at a
discount and man is guided solely by monetary considerations. Then follow a
number of images suggestive of the squalor, and seediness, decay and
dissolution, and sexual degeneration of contemporary life:
The goat soughs at
night in the field overhead:
Rock, mass,
stonecrop, iron, merd,
The woman keeps
the kitchen, makes tea,
Sneezes at
evening, pocking the peevish gutter.
A general picture
of ruin and loss of the zest of life is thus evoked. The goat which is symbol
of potency ‘coughs’ and the woman ‘sneezes’. The use of the epithets
‘blistered’, ‘patched’ and ‘peeled’ for the jew carry the over-tone of venereal
disease, and the suggestion is enforced by his being ‘spawned’ – a word
suggestive of sexual promiscuity – in some low café or brothel. He is the
product of a cosmopolitan urban civilization, a suitable representative of its
materialism and sexual degeneration.
Loss of Faith
In this way, the
geography of the poem is consummately established. But it is a drab, impotent
vista of inactivity, and the decayed and desiccated Gerontion is a suitable
inhabitant of such a house, both literally and metaphorically. What is the
reason for all this debasement and degeneration? It is not sexual corruption;
of course sexual corruption itself is the result of some deeper malady. Under
the influence of science we seek truth intellectually and demand proof for
everything. The modern man required ’signs’ or ‘proofs’ before he can have
faith, but when such ‘signs’ are granted, they merely evoke ‘wonder’, a secular
emotion, and not faith. In this respect, the modern intellectual is no better
than the Pharisees in the Bible who wanted Christ to perform a miracle – to
show them a ‘sign’ or ‘proof’ – before they would have faith in him.
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