Russell Elliott Murphy Critical Companion to T. S. Eliot, A Literary Reference to His Life and Work (2007)

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.C., long before there Eliot s poetry writing in general to this point.even was a London or an Antwerp or a Brussels.Shortly he would write, in The Waste Land, aRather than the life of any flesh-and-blood poetry that provides the reader with no apparentlyspeaker whom the language reveals, then, the sustained structural, verbal, or dramatic clues orreader may be led to suspect, quite rightly, perhaps, other markers to suggest an overriding purpose.that the speaker only appears to be a person, the With Gerontion, the abandonment of standardaction only appears to be realistic in its detail, and generic and tonal clues that had only been hintedthere may in fact be a symbolic drama shaping itself at and toyed with in Eliot s earlier poetic efforts wasin which, instead of a characterization, it is ideas already beginning to take its toll on the reader sor ideals that are being portrayed as if they were comfort and perhaps even patience.themselves characters in a dramatic monologue, in The poetry that Eliot had been writing to thisthis case Gerontion s, as he tells the tale of a tired point had at least allowed the reader to choose hisold man that is really the story of a worn-out cul- or her own point of reference.The relationshipture.The option of that kind of a reading becomes between the evening sky and the patient etherizedeven more alluring a signpost to follow when it is upon a table or between the yellow fog and a cat indiscovered that Eliot was composing the poem just The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock, for example,before he began to conceive of The Waste Land and while not immediately transparent, is neverthelesshad even at one point conceived of Gerontion as suggestively appropriate.That is to say, the readera sort of prelude to that longer, equally dark work.may not land on the exact meaning that the poetAll those hints that these unfolding actions, like intended by such tropes, if there were any, but thethe speaker, may be symbolic rather than specific, reader is nevertheless encouraged to imagine thatfall away to reveal a way of dramatization, it is there is a meaning being intended.possible, of a Europe that has fallen into a cultural In Gerontion, by sharp contrast, Eliot is begin-decline and a moral morass.ning to write a poetry where elements sharing even Gerontion 241the same verse line, let alone the same stanza, seem Gerontion s state is literally a state of mind, theto have an arbitrary if not capricious association at mind of Europe, as Eliot would call it, but alsobest, and that one known only to the poet.Like the minds of the myriad individuals making up theThe Waste Land, Gerontion remains stubbornly modern world.His tiredness and despair mirroritself as a poem, a closeted, secretive text that the a culture that had reached a dead end and hadreader must enter on its terms, nor are those terms become both morally and literally bankrupt as ain any way spelled out except as there seems to be result of World War I, a conflict that would havesomething serious at stake, as much for the reader only lately ended (the armistice effectively closingas for Gerontion.Too, in Gerontion the meta- hostilities had been signed on November 11, 1918).phorical distance between objects of thought and So, then, Gerontion may only stiffen in a rentedthe thoughts themselves is too wide a gap to be eas- house of its jew.owner, a combination that,ily plumbed.The rapid transitions assault the reader: in addition to its blatant anti-Semitism, reflects thefor example, from the epigraph, unattributed as notion that Gerontion has mortgaged his inheri-usual, but which comes from Shakespeare, to images tance.The same concept that Europe had insuggestive of pirates or buccaneers fighting with cut- effect whored itself will later be reflected in thelasses in a swamp, to references to such relatively image of someone named Hakagawa, another non-modern commercial cities as Antwerp, Brussels, and European person of apparently Japanese heritage,London, to, as the first stanza closes, images that bowing among the Titians.The implication is thatare connotative of subsistence living in an agrarian Europe is no longer a vibrant culture; it is a vacatedculture [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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