Tradition as (Disembodied) Voice: “The word within the word” in “Gerontion”
Abstract: For a while, Eliot considered appending “Gerontion” to The Waste Land as a preface. Although it is not, and should not considered as, a part of the greater work, the poem spoken by “a little old man” is more important than often realized. With another look at the seminal essays “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (also 1920) and “The Metaphysical Poets” (1923), this chapter shows how “Gerontion” represents a critique of post-Renaissance civilization with its separation of mind and body, thinking and feeling. The speaker (and title character) here emerges as a “medium” for tradition, which is Eliot’s expressed definition of the poet.
Atkins, G. Douglas. T.S. Eliot and the Failure to Connect: Satire and Modern Misunderstandings. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137364692.
“Gerontion” first appeared in 1920 in Eliot’s Ara Vos Prec, where it has pride of place. His friend Wyndham Lewis linked it as “a close relative of ‘Prufrock’, certain matters filtered through an aged mask in both cases, but ‘Gerontion’ technically is ‘school of Ezra’.”1 Eliot himself considered printing it as a sort of prelude to The Waste Land, still debating the point in early 1922. Pound thought the poems should be kept apart, and so they have remained. As reluctant as I am to question Old Ez’s judgment, I will do so—if only to the extent of suggesting that, though “Gerontion” should not be incorporated into the later, greater poem, it should be read along with it. Indeed, I believe it provides far better help in understanding The Waste Land than do the added notes to Eliot’s most famous and influential work.
If the word “Gerontion” itself points to the general and even the abstract, the words of the first verses confirm an intellectual and symbolic texture absent in “Prufrock,” though some readers persist in seeing Gerontion as a virtual Prufrock writ older: “Here I am, an old man in a dry month, / Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain,” the dryness and the evident desire of rain immediately establishing the link with The Waste Land.2 The man-boy difference appears within a context punctuated with reading and accentuated by the expected heavy charge of “waiting for rain.” The poem then follows as Gerontion’s own account of the stench of a civilization gone bad—that the heaviest of rains cannot cleanse.
Gerontion thus speaks himself, directly, but in a situation and from a place even less specific and dramatic than Prufrock’s. When he says “Think at last / I have not made this show purposelessly,” a bit of the Prufrockian melodrama rears itself, and the following verses, seemingly thematically charged, point toward a condition that at least bears some resemblance to Prufrock’s plaguing self-questioning: “I would meet you upon this honestly,” Gerontion begins, adding that he was once “near your heart,” though subsequently “removed.” When that happened, he lost “beauty in terror, terror in inquisition,” but also his “passion.” He tries to dismiss the losses while detailing that he has “lost” all five senses. “How should I use them for your closer contact?” he asks, pointedly.
Of course these lines shoulder a burden that Prufrock represses, differences between the two poems beginning to emerge in all their significance. The speaking I’s are, in fact, widely different: we have moved from the social satire of Eliot’s short, early poems toward the panoramic exploration of intellectual and spiritual malaise. Prufrock has the psychological richness lacking in Gerontion, who is a persona or, better, voice of cultural analysis, rather than an embodied representation of modern self-examination. Prufrock is as well a dramatic character in a situation charged with irony and even satire, Gerontion less even than a “personage,” mainly, in fact, a static vehicle, or medium, for his author’s dramatic commentary. Prufrock comes alive on the page to a greater degree than his character ever managed; Gerontion was, though, never intended to appear as a live person, his generic name a clue to the abstractness demanded by Eliot’s complex purposes.
Gerontion’s “world” is less stifling than corrupt, more mistaken than misguided. This is not the world of (Pound’s satirized) London drawing-rooms; here, no women “come and go talking of Michelangelo.”3 Mr. Silvero could no more gain entrance here than Prufrock could be heard thinking or speaking of “Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.” “Gerontion” is intellectual, not social, and “the little old man” bears not a burden of knowledge, nor one of expression, but of loss: “I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch: / How should I use them for your closer contact?” He is “Being read to by a boy.”
Like “Stetson” in The Waste Land, Gerontion is a product of Eliot’s “mythical method,”4 having fought neither, he says, with apparent regret if not guilt, at Thermopylae nor in the Great War of recent memory. Immediately, the verses take on universality, abetted by the generic quality of the speaker and title figure: “My house is a decayed house.” Hints elsewhere in the poem suggest that Gerontion speaks metaphorically of his “house,” that it refers, in fact, to his mind. The “Jew” said to be “the owner” on this reading refers to the Judaic side of Western civilization. Now, amidst the near-bestiality that defines his world, and while “The woman,” essentially reduced and made a nonparticipant in the major affairs of the world, “keeps the kitchen, makes tea, / Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish fire,” Gerontion merely repeats, “I am a dull head, among windy spaces.” Taken literally, these last words suggest the speaker’s disembodiedness, his being merely intellectual, a transcendent thing subject to the blowing winds of intellectual fashion and control.
Immediately comes a break,5 followed by a disparate passage, not in a different tone really, but at once connecting with the fascination with divination in the wasteland and representing surprising Christian reference: the second half of the first verse here sounds very much like a wastelander’s expression, though it could be a proper desire, crying out for “a sign.” Evidently “signs” do exist, though they be mistaken in the modern world. As these words repeat “the cry of the unbelieving Pharisees, calling upon Christ to prove his divinity by performing a miracle” (Matthew 12:38),6 they lead to perhaps Eliot’s first literary use of Lancelot Andrewes, who becomes his mentor and whom he in return repays by saving from virtual oblivion. A passage from Bishop Andrewes’s Nativity Sermon preached before James I on Christmas Day 1618 comes closest to Eliot’s resonant words—Andrewes is elucidating Luke 2:12–4:
“And this shall be a sign unto you; ye shall find the Babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.. . . Signs are taken for wonders. ‘Master, we would fain see a sign,’ that is, a miracle. And in this sense it is a sign to wonder at. Indeed, every word here is a wonder. . . . [A]n infant; Verbum infans, the Word without a word; the eternal Word not able to speak a word; i. a wonder sure. 2. And the . . . [child], swaddled; and that a wonder too. ‘He,’ that (as in the thirty-eighth of Job. He saith) ‘taketh the vast body of the main sea, turns it to and fro, as a little child, and rolls it about with the swaddling bands of darkness;’—He to come thus into clouts, Himself!”7
While echoing and even repeating Bishop Andrewes, Eliot also diverges from him, changing “the Word without a word” to the very different “The word within a word.” The significance of the difference may never have been fully appreciated. Not only does Eliot refer to “ordinary” words, rather than the Logos signified by the capital, but he effectively calls attention to the “attended” nature of words, including the capacity he is exploiting to say one thing and mean its virtual opposite, the way of satire.
Then that last sentence in the passage quoted from “Gerontion”: “In the juvescence of the year / Came Christ the tiger.” The strange-sounding first noun here is the earliest instance of the word recorded in the OED; the word “juvenescence,” dating from 1800, means “the state of being youthful or of growing young.” Thus, a word normally applied to a person is, thanks to the Incarnation, also fitting for the natural world, and so Eliot has in mind the renewal that comes with, in, and as spring. That may be Eliot’s intention, but it may also be that he here refers to “the new year” that “Anno Domino” denominates, the new era that began with Christ’s birth. Either way, He came as “the tiger.”
The appearance of “May” in the immediately following verse signals an obvious difference from that “juvescence”: “In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas / To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk / Among whispers.” May is “depraved” in the old sense of being crooked, of taking the wrong direction (and direction will soon figure prominently). If, as Elizabeth Drew contends, Eliot is describing a “new paganism,” itself a product of the advent of Humanism, then the issue is the decay visited upon “the new year” by perversions and corruptions, whereby division replaces unity and catholicity, the sacrament itself divided between eating and drinking (a fact that the line mimics: “To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk”), which separation is indicative of the binarism that replaces the fundamental notion of Incarnation as “impossible union” of seeming opposites.8 Now, in any case, the Word appears present only “Among whispers,” that is, barely heard at all. In this situation, as the references to Mr. Silvero, Hakagawa, Madame de Tornquist, and Fraulein von Kulp suggest, the whole world is given over to misunderstanding of art, to divination, and to the “guilty” closing of the door to possibility: “They are cosmopolitan, rootless and sapless creatures, cut off entirely from the lifeblood of a living tradition”: “Surface texture” only matters, nothing having to do “with a loving heart.”9 “Vacant shuttles / Weave the wind” points to absence of substantive content in the vicissitudes of shifting intellectual fashion while “I have no ghosts” points to the absence of the past and of viable tradition.
It has been proposed that the line “In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas” has reference to the great civilizational changes wrought by the Renaissance, an undoubted good that still had some disastrous consequences.10 It is the time-period to which Eliot always (re)turned. Here he is apparently expanding while focusing his general concern on the historical, offering a truncated, oblique, and elliptical account of the Renaissance, which would, of course, soon form the center of his critical attention in The Sacred Wood. Elizabeth Drew remarks on this passage and the preceding one, writing about the lines I have just quoted, which point “forward to the birth of a new paganism, and oppose the Renaissance to the Nativity. The etymological meaning of depraved as crooked, distorted or perverse, suggests the sense of [that] wrong direction” (italics added).11
The direction of Drew’s analysis certainly “rhymes” with what we have seen and know of Eliot’s point of view, late and early. The possibility acquires credibility with the long verse paragraph on history that Eliot soon adds. It is strikingly different in tone, texture, and even voice (more reminiscent of Four Quartets than of “Prufrock”), with its repetition of forms of the word “give,” including in the opening verse, with the elliptical first reference, perhaps to the just-preceding of generalized contemporary figures engaged in degrees of nefarious acts, and the repeated injunction to “think,” which itself acquires weight from the later focus on the primacy of the (lost) senses: “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?” Then: “Think now,” an injunction twice repeated. Cunning, contriving, and deceiving, history uses our ambitions and “Guides us by our vanities,” giving when we are distracted, the given done “with such supple confusions / That the giving famishes the craving.” What history gives, moreover, comes “too late,” being either what is no longer believed in or is believed only in memory. Neither courage nor fear “saves” us, “Unnatural vices” being “fathered by our heroism,” “Virtues / Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.” It is almost the voice of the “familiar compound ghost,” nearly a quarter-century later in Four Quartets.
I tend to agree with Elizabeth Drew concerning the succeeding account of “history.” As she puts it in T.S. Eliot: The Design of His Poetry, “‘History’ is human experience lived without the framework of a Logos,” man recognizing no power greater than himself, immersed “in the world of temporal fate and change.”12 About the enigmatic term “forgiveness,” Drew suspects “an extended etymology here,” but she never clearly explains what that is. She appears on firm ground, in any case, in observing that the “giving” and the “forgiving” take form as “‘depraved,’ crooked ways of knowledge (cunning), the ways of self-deception and self-interest, their methods of propagation and what they propagate.” She adds, “Man craves knowledge (of himself, of truth), but history presents it ‘when our attention is distracted,’ when we are looking in a different direction, or are in a state of conflict, torn in opposing directions.”13 The word within her word(s) is “winds”; indeed, history begins to appear as the random, shifting, and arbitrary direction of the winds woven by “vacant shuttles.” As to such revelation as the Incarnation embodied, Gerontion says that history merely “Gives too late / What’s not believed in, or is still believed, / In memory only, reconsidered passion.” Note that word “passion” here.
As Eliot represents it, history weaves entailed differences into unintended and unexpected relations and connections: fear and courage, vices and heroism, virtues and crimes. There is no single or clear direction from which it blows or takes us, susceptible, all of us, always, to “windy spaces” and occupants of “a draughty house.” In the “new year”—whatever that is—one thing is certain: “the tiger springs.” But is “the tiger” (still) Christ? Or is there another “tiger,” another force of violence and anger? What we know is that “Us he devours,” which certainly sounds unlike what Christ does in the poem and in history. But history continues on—with or without the individual, including Gerontion and the rest of “Us.” Apparently, the tradition out of which Gerontion speaks has not “reached conclusion, when I / Stiffen in a rented house.” Purpose has attended his efforts and his tradition’s being, and his “show” owes nothing to the movement or excitement of diviners. There is more to it—honestly.
The passage on history is not only interesting but particularly significant. Coming between sections that offer—and seem to affirm—a Christian perspective, the long verse paragraph probably reflects a deep-seated disenchantment following the Great War. Far from providing answers, or offering solace, history lacks all understanding; it is a matter of “cunning,” the “contrived,” and it “deceives.” It guides, but in the wrong direction, “by vanities.” We may often hear, in positive terms, of being on the side of history. Eliot provides a subtle and revealing analysis that disabuses us—or should do—of our misunderstandings, rooted in desire. If, to take perhaps Eliot’s subtlest but most important point, “Unnatural vices / Are fathered by our heroism,” we might pause and consider the relation that obtains between such opposites and rethink the basis of our civilization, such as Eliot has shown it to be. It may even be, then, that in addition to there being a “word within the word,” there is “The Word within the word,” just as Lancelot Andrewes said.
Evidently the following verse paragraph is addressed to the Logos, even as it takes up historical developments again. Gerontion’s attention at this point turns to his “removal” from nearness to the Deity’s “heart” in a truncated reference to the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, the former destructive of the mediation that “beauty” served in approaching God and the latter creative of the terror of the Inquisition. As a result, Gerontion says, pointedly, “I have lost my passion,” the Judeo-Christian tradition now essentially lifeless, its only breath of life being in the mind, and even there, hardly influential. “Why should I need to keep it / Since what is kept must be adulterated?” he asks. And indeed, passion decays into indulgence, such as earlier in the poem has been delineated. With the loss of passion has come loss of the five senses, which once were used as a means to approach God, the—indirect—way of Incarnation.
The penultimate verse paragraph seems anti-climactic, although “wind” returns as a major image and thematic matter. The beginning presents an apparent disenchantment with too much thinking (help me not to think too much, says Ash-Wednesday): “These with a thousand small deliberations / Protract the profit of their chilled delirium, / Excite the membrane,” leading in the multiplied variety to “a wilderness of mirrors.” The lines literalize the metaphor of reflecting, part of the intellectual apparatus; reflection and “pungent sauces” of “deliberating” take over with the cooling of sense, all this extending “the profit”—such as it is—of the cold “delirium” of those “deliberations.” Not an attractive or encouraging portrait, this, of dissociated sensibility.
What should you expect? Gerontion implies: “What will the spider do / Suspend its operations, will the weevil / Delay?” Further “decay” thus lies waiting, for neither the spider nor the weevil will, or can, go against its nature. The winds continue to blow, and their force is hard, if not impossible, to oppose and resist. The Trade Winds blow almost constantly in one direction, and the world bows to the direction of the wind, woven, always, by “Vacant shuttles.”
Like Prufrock, Gerontion with his dry brain knows. Lacking the senses, and passion, he thinks himself incapable of “forgiving”—and worries less about that when he recalls that Christ came as “the tiger” and “devours” us, those in need of forgiveness and those who might forgive as they could. History, certainly, does not forgive, and what it gives, which “Gerontion” emphasizes, is a mixture, often opposites together, no clear or single direction taken or apparent. History is, in fact, fickle, deceitful, untrustworthy, unpredictable, less dependable, indeed, than the wind, which sometimes, in some places (the Trades, for instance), blows uni-directionally.
At the end of the poem, the old man is cornered—by winds blowing in one direction through his house: feeble (evidently), certainly inactive, in a world full of motion and movement. He has lost all passion, which is, paradoxically, loss of pattern. Pattern does not exist in the winds—woven by “vacant shuttles.” We get his thoughts, products of a brain lacking nourishment in an un-nourishing age. That nourishment, though, would not come via metaphorical rain.
In “Gerontion,” voice is critical, not surprisingly, given its prominence in The Waste Land, and we shall (re)consider it in some detail, but first I want to return to the presence and treatment of history in the poem. It matters that the “hints and guesses” offered here come from relatively familiar territory, the Renaissance and particularly the situation in the West post-Reformation. It was all, in Eliot’s view, and to borrow from his mentor Dryden, a “good” that had perhaps “full as bad a Consequence.”14 Terror eclipsed “beauty” while creating “inquisition.” For both this poem and The Waste Land, the immediate consequence was the loss of the senses, all eclipsed upon the altar of the reason and the intellect. Gerontion is, literally, a “head,” having “thoughts” but few if any vital emotions. Thus he can speak so matter-of-factly, thus appear so disengaged; thus, perhaps, we know why he 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.” Gerontion is neither a fighter nor a lover. He has been “removed” from “your heart,” which I take to mean that he is no longer close to God or to Christ. The way to the Deity proceeds in, through, and by means of the senses, a notion obviously foreign to the wastelanders. “Thy approach” refers to God’s initiating contact.
In this way, Gerontion figures the “dissociation of sensibility” that Eliot was writing about at the time he was completing The Waste Land: thought had long before become separated from feeling, with the result, among others, that “feeling became more crude.” The two require each other, feeling and thinking; their dissociation is, then, one of those many that plague modern man. Gerontion, the “dull head,” is that figure; he, literally, is the “dissociation of sensibility.”15 In the poem, despite his “removal” from the senses, Gerontion serves as a valuable and mainly reliable analyst of history’s “cunning passages, contrived corridors / And issues.”
The voice we hear, from this “head,” separated and disembodied, is not of a person or a character. In fact, Gerontion seems altogether lacking in personality, and the reason is, he has no personality to express but is, rather, a medium. The informed reader of Eliot will, or should, immediately recognize, then, the relation to another famous and influential essay of Eliot’s, “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” There, significantly, Eliot repeatedly refers to the mind of the poet; in “Gerontion” he gives us “the mind” speaking. And there, via the “analogy” of “the catalyst,” Eliot proposes a theory of poetry that entails the surrender of the poet’s own “personality”; he or she is a “more finely and perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations” (italics added).16 This rich statement at once rhymes with “The Metaphysical Poets” and the notion there of the poet as “amalgamating disparate experience” and with “Gerontion.”17 In both essay and poem, in fact, the speaker, in the former case Eliot himself and in the latter the mind of an old man, speaks as tradition. Voice is a critical issue throughout Eliot’s first collection of essays, The Sacred Wood, in which “Tradition and the Individual Talent” is reprinted, in the same year as “Gerontion” appeared in Poems. That voice, often appearing magisterial, and certainly authoritative as well as lacking in individualism, succeeds, insofar as it does, by serving as medium. Any individuality emerges in, through, and by means of the surrender of personality to traditional understanding, just what Gerontion (too) utters at nearly the same time.
The poem reveals, however, some difference from the essay’s point of view. What “the mind” that is Gerontion expresses, is traditional, that is, pre-modern, understanding; he is the medium of precisely that. As a voice of “dissociated” times, and having lost all the senses, Gerontion can be no perfect spokesman for a vital tradition; he is “adulterated,” exactly what he says happens when passion is “kept.” That he is now being “read to” points to Gerontion’s loss of the ability to see. He can, fortunately, still express himself in words, although he ends by describing the “Tenants of the house” that is his mind as “Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.”
When he, rather casually, mentions “The word within the word, unable to speak a word,” Gerontion points to the way this poem as well as The Waste Land works. Still able to speak, he unleashes “the word within the word,” revealing the “hints and guesses” that Eliot regards positively and thereby elucidating for us the great satire, which always proceeds indirectly. It is not the Logos, to be sure, not the Word, that we hear speaking in “Gerontion,” but a pilgrim voice bereft of passion and the senses, a voice giving us clues, making guesses, offering us hints. With the senses lost, it is entirely appropriate that Gerontion himself be only a head, with no body. (And the Word does break through.)
These “hints and guesses” are Eliot’s, and as such they differ from the “fragments” that the (satirized) speaker in The Waste Land “shores against [my] ruins.” Hints are to be looked at, savored, pored over, meditated upon perhaps, whereas fragments, differently, are each in and of themselves very little. Hints are, moreover, given, fragments put together by someone other than their planter or maker. Hints have the capacity to reveal pattern; with fragments, the observer has to create, not merely find, the pattern. You can never be sure that the fragments make a whole.
In the final analysis (which is what the mind that is Gerontion offers us), “the little old man” serves as a medium for Eliot himself to express a point of view different from that embodied in the wastelanders and their representative alike. This is how we got here, Eliot seems to be saying in his words within the words; this is what the “dissociation of sensibility” hath wrought, what the Renaissance and the Reformation have bequeathed us. It is a complex, in ways terrifying, certainly sad history.
The way of difference lies not in escape, or palliation, which may amount to the same thing. It lies, instead, in immersion: in the waste land, you keep on going, through it. To seek a key is also counter-productive; a fragment from The Waste Land is also a valuable hint: “We think of the key, each in his prison / Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.” “Sovegna vos,” advises Ash-Wednesday: be mindful.
Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems offers elucidation of “Gerontion,” and thus of The Waste Land, reminding us that though “The Word [may be] without a word,” It remains “the centre” about which “the unstilled world still whirl[s].” “The word within the word,” on the other hand, instances that there is always another, “a third, beside you,” “the Word within / The world and for the world.” It may simply be the word.
1 B.C. Southam, A Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot, 6th edn (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace, 1996), 68.
2 T.S. Eliot, “Gerontion,” Poems 1909–1925 (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1925). As has been frequently acknowledged, “Gerontion” connects with a later poem as well, the second Ariel Poem, A Song for Simeon.
3 T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Prufrock and Other Observations (London: Egoist Press, 1917).
4 T.S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” The Dial, n.s. (Fall 1959), 153–58 (originally published in The Dial, November 1923).
5 R.P. Blackmur early on wrote that Eliot did not “complete” the poem, leaving completion up to his reader. He calls Gerontion “an ideal figure self-seen, self-dramatized in a series of rapid, penetrating statements.” Although each of these, he supposes, makes sense in itself, “the material between” them matters, and several times the reader finds his breath inexplicably cut short” (Outsider at the Heart of Things, ed. James T. Jones [Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1989], 47). The point is suggestive, including for “The Hollow Men,” where “between” plays such a powerful thematic and rhetorical role.
6 B.C. Southam, A Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot, 6th edn (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace, 1996), 70.
7 Qtd. in ibid., 71.
8 T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943).
9 Elizabeth Drew, T.S. Eliot: The Design of His Poetry (New York: Scribner’s, 1949), 52.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid., 54.
13 Ibid.
14 John Dryden, Religio Laici, or A Laymans Faith (London, 1682).
15 T.S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” Selected Essays, 3rd edn (London, 1951), 10.
16 T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1920), 48.
17 T.S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” Selected Essays, 3rd edn (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 287.