Gerontion by T.S Eliot

if you are viewing this page on mobile please rotate your screen or you will have plenty of discomfort.

Poem:-   


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.

The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea,

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

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.


T. S. Eliot, "Gerontion" from Collected Poems: 1909-1962.  Copyright © 2020 by T. S. Eliot.  Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber, Ltd...


Analysis of the poem Gerontion by T.S Eliot

Description of the poem Gerontion by T.S Eliot

  1. Gerontion is a poem by T. S. Elist

  2. The title is Greek for " little old man”.

  3. The poem is a dramatic monologue.

  4. The poem relates the opinions and impressions of an Elderly man.

  5. The elderly man describes Europe after the World War

  6. He lived the majority of his life in the 19th century.

  7. Gerontion discussed themes of religion, sexuality and other general topics of modernist poetry.

  8. A) The poem opens with an epigraph taken from Shakespeare's play - “Measure for Measure

B) “Thou hast nor youth nor age But as it were an after dinner sleep dreaming of both”.

  1. The poem is a monologue describing household work-

  1. a boy reading book to him.

  2. a woman, tending the kitchen

  3. the Jewish landlord and

  4. four others all at the same place

  1. The poem then moves to abstract meditation.

  2. The speaker of the poem uses several different voices to express the impression of Gerontion.

  3. Here we find an internal struggle. within the poem.

  4. Time is also altered, past, and present are superimposed

  5. Series of characters and cultures are Connected

  6. The poet attempts to present the theme of Christianity from the viewpoint of the modernist individual

  7. The poem moves from "Juvescence of the year (Christmas Day) to the crucifixion (depraved May)

  8. The narrator refers to Jesus as "Christ the Tiger."

  9. Gerontion views his life as the product of sin.

  1. He has to reject the "dead world" to attain Salvation.

  2. Critics say that in Gerontion, Eliot describes that religion is important not because of its spirituality but because of the 'culture' leaves’

  3. Eliot tells his generation that history is "nothing but human depravity”.

  4. Gerontion shows that his loss of faith in Christianity has resulted in emotional sterility.

  5. Tue "closer contact sought by the narrator represents the emotional Connection.

  6. Gerontions words have no metaphysical features.

  7. The language is studded with puns and words within words.

  8. The passage on history is a series of metaphors that dissolve into incomprehensibility


These are not for homework, these are taken from thePoem Analysisto understand the poem better.


Summary of the poem Gerontion by T.S Eliot

Gerontion’ by T.S. Eliot is a complex look at the poet’s own world, war, religion, and politics in and around the year 1919.


This poem is quite complicated and filled with imagery, symbols, and allusions to places, actions, literature, art, and personal experience. There are a range of interpretations a reader might have in regard to what this piece is about. Broadly though, it takes a reader through life in 1919 and the changes, from an old man named Gerontion’s perspective. He was in the war and spends time at the beginning of the poem juxtaposing it against his current life. He’s old now, long past his days of fighting and takes a very strong dislike to the money-hungry, religiously ignorant and politically willful people who live around him today


Structure and Form

Gerontion’ by T.S. Eliot is an eight-stanza poem that’s divided into uneven sets of lines. There is no single rhyme scheme or metrical pattern, meaning that the poem is written in free verse. 

                        The text is a dramatic monologue and comes from the perspective of an old man, Gerontion, who is located in an old house. Some scholars believe that he is an older version of Eliot’s most famous creation, J. Alfred Prufrock. 

                        A reader should also take note of the epigraph that appears at the beginning of the poem. It reads: “Thou hast nor youth nor age / But as it were an after-dinner sleep / Dreaming of both”. These lines come from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure.


Poetic Techniques in Gerontion

Eliot makes use of several techniques in ‘Gerontion’. These include alliteration, personification, repetition, and enjambment. The first, alliteration, occurs when words are used in succession, or at least appear close together, and begin with the same letter. For example, “man” and “month” in the first line of stanza one and “flight, fought” in line six of the same stanza. 

                     Personification occurs when a poet imbues a non-human creature or object with human characteristics. There are several examples in text, especially in stanza seven in which the speaker talks about bats, bears, and spiders. 

                    Repetition is the use and reuse of a specific technique, word, tone or phrase within a poem. For instance, the repetition of “Think at last” in the sixth stanza. Anaphora is another kind of repetition, it can be seen when the same word or words are used at the beginnings of multiple lines. For example, lines four and five of the fifth stanza, both of which begin with “Nor”.

                    Another important technique commonly used in poetry is enjambment. It occurs when a line is cut off before its natural stopping point. Enjambment forces a reader down to the next line, and the next, quickly. One has to move forward in order to comfortably resolve a phrase or sentence. For example, the transitions between lines two and three of the third stanza and lines four and five of the fifth stanza. 


Analysis of the poem Gerontion

Stanza One Lines 1-4

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

In the first stanza of ‘Gerontion’ by T.S. Eliot the speaker begins by locating himself and giving the reader a few details about who he is. He’s old and living through a “dry month”. He’s in a liminal space in which he’s waiting for something but also experiencing something. A boy is there reading to him. He doesn’t say who this boy is, he’s just as important as any other item in his immediate surroundings. 

The speaker is not focused on what’s going on around him though. Rather, he’s looking back into the past. He takes note of the fact that he’s not “at the hot gates” or “in the warm rain”. The first of these statements is a reference to Thermopylae, a history-changing battle between the Greeks and Persians in 480 BC. 

Stanza One Lines  5-16

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.

The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea,

Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.

                                           I an old man,

A dull head among windy spaces.


He is not in the war, fighting “in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass”. These images are scary, painful, and uncomfortable to imagine but for the speaker, they hold more appeal than his current location. Eliot uses juxtaposition in order to compare his present situation to the war. Now, he is in a decayed house. It’s not decaying, it’s already decayed, as if its life is entirely over. The old man rents the house and there is some kind of pressure from the owner of the establishment. 

                         The speaker takes his mind out of his home and into the landscape surrounding the decaying house. He tells the reader how the “goat coughs at night” in the field and all around there are “Rocks, moss, stonecrop” and more. The world is different than it was when he was at war. Now there is a woman making tea and “poking at the peevish gutter” and he is “an old man”. He uses a metaphor to describe himself as “A dull head among windy spaces”. This description alludes to an inescapable emptiness and an inability to fill it.  

Stanza  two and three 

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;


The second and third stanzas of ‘Gerontion’ are much shorter than the first, at only four and five lines each. These lines are much harder to pin down than those which came before them. It’s here that the many different interpretations of the poem come into play. There are a series of “signs” introduced in these lines. These are symbols, many of which can be linked to the political and religious atmosphere of the time, as referenced in the introduction.

                  The line “The word within a word, unable to speak a word” originated from a speech by a seventeenth-century bishop about the Christ child and God’s word.  

                Eliot goes on to use natural imagery to describe the speaker’s immediate surroundings and the happenings of the season. The flow of names and images in the final lines of the third stanza provides the reader with bits of information about those who live around him. There is “Mr. Silver” who cares for his possessions more than anything.

Stanza Four

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.


There is also Nakagawa, who is “bowing among the Titians,” appearing to be worshipping a dead artist. Also, “Madame de Tornquist” who’s “shifting candles” in a dark room. This is a foreboding phrase in ‘Gerontion’ that might suggest some kind of untoward ceremony. Lastly, Fräulein von Kulp who appears guilty of something with “one hand on the door”. These ghost-like neighbours are followed by the speaker stating that he has “no ghosts”. 

Stanza Five

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 fifth stanza of ‘Gerontion’ is longer than the previous three, stretching out to fifteen lines. The speaker makes a series of statements about history and how hard it is to grasp and understand. “history,” personified as “She” has “many cunning passages” and “contrived corridors”. There are complications to be navigated and everyone is guided by “vanities,” alluding more broadly to how history is playing itself out. 

The next lines are complex, but while continuing to speak about history the speaker addresses how and what “she gives” and what it does to those who receive. One quite powerful phrase comes at the end of this stanza. Gerontion says “Think / Neither fear nor courage saves us.  Unnatural vices / Are fathered by our heroism”. He is looking back to the past, considering what it was like and what it has now fathered. That is the world he feels growing around him and that he’s like to change. 

Stanza Six


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

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?


Repetition plays an important part at the beginning of the sixth stanza of ‘Gerontion’. In these lines, the speaker reuses the phrase “Think at last” a few times while proposing ideas about the past, present, and future. By making use of the phrase “the tiger springs in the new year” Eliot might again be considering what he saw as negative changes to the social and political landscape. The world is progressing, but not necessarily becoming safer. The fact that they have yet to reach a conclusion is connected to his “Stiffen[ing]” in the rented, degraded house. 

                         In the middle part of this stanza, he invites “you” to “meet upon this” and speak honestly about loss, his removal from “your heart,” and passion. 

                         In the last lines of this stanza, the speaker returns to discussing loss, and valuable loss at that. He speaks about losing the parts of his life that were worth something. His passion is gone and even if it wasn’t, he doesn’t think he should keep it. Everything that remains has to be “adulterated” or manipulated, changed, or even dirtied. The last two lines of this stanza depict the speaker’s loss of his senses. 


Stanzas Seven and Eight


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.


The seventh stanza contains the greatest variety of compelling images of the poem. He continues to speak about thoughts, understandings, deliberations and agreements while alluding to the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles and necessarily the signings of the Treaty of Versailles in the summer of 1919. 

             Most of the phrases and images in these lines are very much up for interpretation. From the “weevil” delaying and the “shuddering Bear / In fractured atoms”. At the end of the stanza, it comes back around to the “old man” who is at the centre of these thoughts and predictions. He is driven by the trade winds “To a sleepy corner” where he waits out the rest of his life. 

             The last stanza of ‘Gerontion’ is only two lines long. It reminds the reader of the “dry season” and refers to all these thoughts as coming from a “dry brain”. The speaker’s separation from the contemporary world, specifically present trends in politics, religion, and social life, is quite clear.