“Language,” as Eliot’s contemporary Wittgenstein reminds us, “is not con-
tiguous to anything else.”^9 And further: “to imagine a language means to
imagine a form of life.”^10 Julius sees “Gerontion” as a “querulous poem” in
which “there is no bitterness because there is no loss” (43). To make this as-
sertion, he must take out of context Gerontion’s insistence that he is “A dull
head among windy spaces” (line 16), and that he has “no ghosts” (line 33),
that he has, accordingly, never properly suffered, being no more than an
empty vessel.
But does this interpretation really account for the poem? I propose here
to look closely at its linguistic and sonic substructure, especially in the ¤rst
two movements, which comprise lines 1–33. My assumption as we proceed is
that there are no “etceteras” here, that every word, and indeed every sound
and rhy thmic movement, makes a difference. Consider the opening:
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 ®ies, fought.These lines have received more than their share of explication, beginning
with their relationship to the epigraph from Measure for Measure and their
appropriation of the passage in A. C. Benson’s biography of Edward Fitzger-
ald (1905): “Here he sits, in a dry month, old and blind, being read to by a
country boy, longing for rain.” The phrase “hot gates” is a literal translation
of the Greek proper name Thermopylae—thus a reference to the decisive
battle (480bc) of the Persian Wars, in which the Spartans defeated the Greeks
at the narrow pass by that name. Also Greek is the title “Gerontion,” meaning
“little old man” and signaling (or seeming to signal) that this, like “The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” is a monologue spoken by an invented persona.^11
But such source study can do little to account for the passage’s peculiar
power and passion, for the sense that something terribly important, both to
the poet and the reader, is at stake here. Indeed, the “little old man” cover
recedes almost immediately, and by line 17 (“Signs are taken for wonders”)
the vocal urgency is clearly the poet’s own, even if it is an abstracted version,
or “auditor y illusion” to use Hugh Kenner’s phrase,^12 of that personal pres-
ence. The subject may feel like an old man because he has not fought, be-
cause he has made the Dantean “grand refusal” in his rejection of Christ,
and because, as we learn later in the poem, his moral and sexual failures
24 Chapter 2