tion of Europe at the time of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles
doesn’t work. The modern political theme, which affects the whole
world, is being forced through too narrow a channel.And Spender concludes: “After the strong ¤rst part of ‘Gerontion,’ the poem
becomes lost in its own corridors and dark passages. It is not so much ob-
scure as cryptic.... The last part of ‘Gerontion’ hovers ambiguously be-
tween tragic statement and black farce, with ‘high camp’ thrown in at the
end.”^6
A telling contrast, Spender argues, is with another great poem of the very
same moment: Yeats’s “The Second Coming.” Citing the passage beginning
with “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” Spender remarks that “Yeats
states in six lines what Eliot conveys indirectly through his long passage of
Jacobean pastiche.... The tone of these lines is Biblical, apocalyptic and
Aeschylean, and it is this which Eliot was to adopt in The Waste Land.” And
Spender cites the lines in “The Burial of the Dead” based on Ezekiel 2, “What
are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish?”
But this particular vocal register is only one of many in The Waste Land, with
its collage of contrasting voices, and as for “Gerontion,” the monologue we
read, far from being that of the prophet or visionary, projects the voice of an
introspective, self-searching and self-conscious being, who does not neces-
sarily trust his own eyes. The Yeats of “The Second Coming” knows what has
happened in a world where “The best lack all conviction, while the worst /
Are full of passionate intensity.” The vision of the “blood-dimmed tide,”
which prepares us for the image of the “rough beast, Slouch[ing] toward
Bethlehem to be born,” is conveyed as a larger my thic construct, available to
all who open their eyes to see it. In “Gerontion,” by contrast, there is no such
visionary truth, only a series of tentative gropings—those “Tenants of the
house / Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.” “Thoughts,” in this con-
text, are inseparable from the meanings conveyed by verbal, rhythmic, and
syntactic units. At each point in Eliot’s resonant echo chamber, meanings
that are multiplex are arraigned, the poem generally moving simultaneously
on at least three planes—the sexual, the sociocultural, and the religious.
In recent years, however, discussion of what “Gerontion” “says” has fo-
cused less on the issue of structural coherence than on the poem’s purported
anti-Semitism, although the two are, as we shall see, not unrelated. The full-
est case against Eliot on this score was made by Anthony Julius in his T. S.
Eliot: Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form (1995). Julius’s second chapter, de-
voted to “Gerontion,” makes much of the three lines:
22 Chapter 2