LIDIA VIANU

T.S. Eliot - An Author for All Seasons

POETRY

GERONTION (1920) is the first of the poems I have chosen to mis-read, so to say. Or rather, to read in a different way from the bulk of criticism known to me so far, which never fails to see in this poem an indictment of man's wickedness, coming from an irritable (but mainly in the right) God. The whole poem is the monologue of a ‘little old man’ (Gerontion), interspersed (Eliot's favourite resource) with the most unexpected quotations. To native English speakers, most of these echoes are fairly recognizable. The motto comes from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure (act III, scene 1). Someone who knows Shakespeare's play (and knows it well, as a result of repeated readings, with deeply imprinted memories of some felicitous phrases) may recognize in it the moment when a condemned man is told that life is not really worth living and that, besides, it is never actually ours to handle as we wish. Life just flits away as insubstantially as a dream. From this very motto, therefore, the downward, descending mood that reigns over Eliot's sensibility is introduced. That life is a trap, because most often than not it turns against the being who thinks himself its owner, is Eliot's most recurrent complaint.

The first 15-line stanza, easily separable from the next, owing to the total lack of explanatory links between images, describes, indeed, a very old and feeble man. It is typical of Eliot to delight in paradoxes at every level. This old man's feebleness is rendered by means of shockingly violent images. The contrast is rather awkward. The first two lines come from a Life of Edward FitzGerald by A.C. Benson. A long list of critics have been busy tracing these bookish echoes, to no disadvantage to the poem whatever. The quoted lines state plainly that the speaker is some old man who longs for rain. We must be suspicious of this lack of ambiguity, knowing that Eliot's clarity is one of emotion, and much less of its ‘verbal equivalent’. It must not be forgotten that, but for Ezra Pound, who strongly advised against it, Eliot would have placed Gerontion as a prelude to The Waste Land. Anyway, the rain never arrives in either of the poems. Now, a critic's job (in spite of Eliot's repeated  refutations of the fact) is to sift the work he writes about through the magic sieve of his impressions and words. He might also put the work to the test of various methods, on condition he does not become the slave of any. A piece of criticism on Eliot's poetry is, therefore, meant to allow the critic to be seen behind it. That is why it seems quite strange that such a number of Eliot's critics have so far been busily employed in mathematically (‘coolly’ and ‘impersonally’) detecting the ‘symbols’, the hidden cipher of some (I think) undecodable images.

Eliot's power, the power of a man who so often used the associative tune of bookish echoes, is to suggest, not to hide. He shuns explanations (in his criticism he repeatedly says so), because he wants his poems to be caressingly guessed at, not exposed pitilessly under broad daylight. There is an obvious secrecy about Eliot's poems, which he hates to see violated. The images of this first stanza of Gerontion are, then, rather suggestive of, than equal to a certain explainable, definable or definite meaning. As Eliot so often repeated, poetry can only be felt if it is not explained. Virginia Woolf expected of the ‘modern mind’ to allow each moment / experience to fall and impress it at random. She thus replaced the chronologically coherent narrative by a non-chronological, associative (therefore fragmentary) story. It was a mixture of future, past and present moments, joined on an emotional and subjective basis. She was interested in a sequence that takes place rather in the soul of her heroes then in the impersonal flow of incidents that besiege them. In the same way, Eliot would like his readers, on first reading his poems, to allow their impressions to pervade their hearts before their minds have had the time to order them. He feels that the heart has always a passport to penetrate into the realm of poetry, unless the mind (which might spoil the magic) accompanies it. This is the reason why his images are suggestive, and die when decoded into bare thoughts. They appeal to the emotions. They are meant to move rather than set the readers thinking. They count on the reader's following Eliot's own habit of associative feeling, more than arouse the reader's associative thinking. You read a line and suddenly you feel as if you were in two (three, four, even more) places at once. This willed disorder and ambiguity gives Eliot's poetic world the magic coordinates of a nowhere land. Every object, every word, every line, every apparently clear image is highly elusive.

The feeble little old man of the first stanza lives in a world which may look like a magic carpet. We see it flying here and there, inside and outside what we call reality. It was the age of relativity, and Eliot did his best to push this narrow reality farther than the boundaries of our prejudices. We find ourselves now above, then suddenly underground. Images of mysterious anger (Gerontion's? God's?) surround the old man. He never valiantly fought in a war, he says. He never reached the ‘hot gates’ (more suggestive words than Thermopylae). These gates seem to be opening towards who knows what hell, where he ought to have once struggled, dragging his feet through marshes, heaving a ‘cutlass’, bitten by flies. An image smelling half of Dante, half of Eliot's own taste for disgusting mud, horrifying insects and impotence.

This powerless and self-despising old man lives in a ‘decayed’ house (reminding us, indeed, of the ‘decayed’ chapel in part V of The Waste Land). A strange abode, over whose roof there is a field, where at night a goat is heard coughing. Why a goat? Too many have tried to find a hidden meaning there. The goat is surrounded by ‘rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds’. Among other things, Eliot always was (Lawrence Durrell was right) a poet of the uncomfortable, the uninhabitable, the unthinkable and the most unpleasant. A denying poet, besides being a gloomy one, in short. There is a slightly ridiculous old woman in this house, too. She sneezes in the evening (before the goat coughs at night). She cleans the kitchen, cooks supper, pokes the feeble fire that will not give warmth. There is here a touch of clumsy irony, which Eliot often uses to an ambiguous purpose. He either means to make us laugh (which he does not), or to sympathize, as if we were in front of someone who has a natural infirmity, which may look ridiculous but it would not do for us to laugh at that. This misplaced irony makes us feel thoroughly uncomfortable in the chilly space which, but for a window that is mentioned, might very well be a tomb under a field. As for the window, a ‘Jew’ (identified by some as Christ) who owns the house (man's body, maybe) is squatting on the window sill, as if lying in ambush. A sense of impotence, of discomfort, of life decayed, of menacing death approaching, all these besiege the old man. He feels bereft, a ‘dull head among windy spaces’. Monotonous, this use of only two lyrical registers in this poem: powerlessness (the hazy head), and the cold, which makes shiver a body that is slowly deserted by its life.

The second stanza turns abruptly to an apparently different topic. The hiatus that we feel here is only at the level of words. The logic, the understatement of the poem, goes on along its firm way, it is never abandoned or interrupted. These suggested statements, because of the verbally elliptical aspect of the poem, are ambiguous. Saying less, Eliot suggests more. Like an oracle, he utters understatements which, when over-stated for the sake of explanation, reveal a richness of interpretations. Their merit lies in this very duplicity, which allows the reader to choose whatever meaning seems more suitable to his own disposition. It is not difficult at all to interpret this stanza in the  spirit. It starts with the reproaching line, ‘Signs are taken for wonders’. The line is followed by the image of a guilty man, who is unable to believe in anything above or different from him, unless he touches, he strokes the metaphysical with his hands. Which, of course, is impossible. Therefore, the second line describes

‘The word within a word, unable to speak a word,

Swaddled with darkness’.

The situation sounds desperate. Man is consequently doomed to fail. In the ‘juvescence’ (word coined by Eliot to replace the Latin ‘juvenescence’), that is, the birth of the year (Christmas), Christ is born, and to what end? If we go along this accusing line, we shall interpret the ‘depraved May’ as the time of Easter. It is then that we see around ‘dogwood’ (the wood Christ's cross was made of) and ‘flowering judas’ (name that reminds of Christ's being fatally betrayed). Centuries after his crucifixion, Christ seems to be born over and over again, only to die at Easter endlessly, and to be ‘eaten’, ‘divided’, ‘drunk’ during the yearly religious service. The people he once came to help did not, still do not need him. They prefer the ‘sign’. Christ's sacrifice was wasted and the failure is man's, not Christ's. Man goes to church and ignores its essence. Several names of various nationalities are mentioned: Mr. Silvero, Hakagawa, Madame de Tornquist, Fräulein von Kulp. Together with the lines addressed directly to the reader, they generalize the meaning of the poem, including into it humanity at large. Eliot describes them all in meaningless, again clumsily ridiculous and intensely displeasing postures. One walks all night to and fro in the adjoining room (a sense of guilt prevents him from sleeping?). Another bows (that is all he can do) among miracles of art (paintings by Titian). A woman shifts the candles (out of a sense of fear?). Another woman's name (Kulp) is directly suggestive of guilt. What is the use of all these disparate images forcibly massed together? To lead to a conclusion: human beings are mere ‘vacant shuttles’ that ‘weave the wind’. Gerontion too is, like them (powerless because unable to reach God?),

‘an old man in a draughty house

Under a windy knob’.

Disquieting, again, this image of life entombed before it has actually ceased to breathe.

The anger of the first stanza is continued in the second. It does not seem to restrict itself to only the  sense. A few words plainly discourage the religious interpretation:

‘In the juvescence of the year

Came Christ the tiger’.

Why the tiger? Can the word have been used only to remind us of Blake's poem? Is it just another bookish echo, meant to create a mental melody? We might even ignore it, if it did not appear in the fourth stanza again:

‘The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours. Think at last’...

This third stanza, in between the above-mentioned lines, seems to make things very much clearer. It describes man's utter powerlessness. ‘History’, with its maze of ‘passages’, ‘corridors’ and ‘issues’, is deceptive. What man seems to be granted is in fact out of his reach. The fulfillment of a wish or hope comes either too early, when one is unable to enjoy it properly, or too late, when the wish (like a lover's passion) is dead. Human hunger (what for?) is thus never unappeased. Four times the imperative ‘think!’ (‘now’, then ‘at last’) is uttered: think of what? The last line speaks of human tragedy and of human ‘tears’, but:

‘These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree’.

Wrath is now named aloud. A certain tree (easily recognizable – the apple tree that man craved for, God denied, man stole and we all know what followed) bears it. Of course, this wrath can belong to the God who chased man out of Paradise. But the tears, would they be his, too? The stanza abounds in images of victimized human beings. Why then shouldn't Eliot's tree rather bear the wrath of a man who was the victim of divine punishment, and whose tears and anger are openly directed against that vengeful God? The first line makes it even more final:

‘After such knowledge, what forgiveness?’

Of course, the Bible often wonders whether God can ever forgive man. Only we are not compelled to do the same. Now man knows (has been warned by this very poem) how utterly lonely and helpless he is in this wide universe. Can then God (or whatever other name the creator of this world may bear) be forgiven for pushing him over the brink of the precipice? For having made man mortal, for having (by destroying for him the existence of a real Paradise) created death? ‘The tiger springs in the new year’, Eliot says. ‘Us he devours’. The image of a solitary human being, unwillingly mortal, and therefore full of anger against sky and earth, emerges from this stanza. And, in a way, taking into account the intense sense of tragedy the poem creates, God or religion may very well have nothing to do with it. What Gerontion really speaks of is his own, his mortal condition, which he has to go through alone. No second character is really allowed even to speak of it. This is first and foremost the monologue of a man who feels he is alone in the world. God, to this dying man, is just another word, another absence.

The fourth stanza lends certainty to this inference. In a ‘rented house’ (a suggestive image for the perishable human body), the speaker is slowly ‘stiffening’. Remarkable, this gift Eliot always had of challenging what his every fibre feared most. In all his works, he looks like a fighter who duels with the sense of death. He puts on a mask of undaunted belief in life, although he dimly realizes that, while fencing, he is being driven with his back against the last fatal wall, where he will finally be stabbed to death. This is where the violence of his images comes from. The courage of his harsh, shameless words is, in spite of their blinding clarity, an understatement of reticent regret, of a silent but intense sense of loss. That is why feebleness is paradoxically rendered in this poem by means of aggressive snapshots. A temperamental shyness reduced Eliot to wearing a hideous mask. Maybe we should remember here again that he once firmly denied being either learned or cold?

The speaker's protracted dying is described with sickening minuteness. He has lost his ‘passion’, ‘sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch’. Gerontion argues with someone who has pushed him away, with somebody absent from the poem, as a matter of fact. At this stage, it would be too little to say that the dying old man is merely dissatisfied with his condition. Wrath against the injustice he feels is being done to him pervades every single word he spits out. The whole stanza is a howl of despair, which the end of the poem tries to soften by means of a touch of irony. But this irony is so clumsy, crude and distasteful that, instead of being softened, the sense of tragedy is downright intensified. Some of the images are variations along the line,

‘Excite the membrane when the sense has cooled’.

Others are more palatable flashes of a gull whirled by the wind, of white feathers (its own?) fallen in the snow, of (again violent) winds, windy straits, killing Gulfs, of the fatal Horn and the Trades. Everything ends where it had begun, in a ‘sleepy corner’, where the thoughts of this old man, of his ‘dry brain in a dry season’, are merely ‘tenants’ of a house. Something, whether it is life, or the whole world, or just our memory of this poem, is going to end for good and all. So, what Gerontion manages to convey (leaving aside scholarly or bookish investigation) is a poignant sense of disappearance. Rather than call this a religious poem, we ought to see in it the regret that everything (God is, in fact, already absent) is bound to disintegrate. We ought to sense in it, first and last, Eliot's intense fear of a lifeless universe, his horror of the dark.