have made him lose his “sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch” (line 60).
But physical age has no more to do with the things that count in this poem
than it does in “Prufrock,” another poem in which the young male speaker
feels old. Indeed, as Denis Donoghue points out, the ¤rst title Eliot tried out
was Gerousia, “Greek for a consultative body or council of elders in Sparta”
(Wo rd s Alone 77). Eliot’s original intention, it seems from this, was to produce
an anatomy of the modern condition by presenting us with a “council,” sit-
ting in judgment of those the Tiger devours. Such an anatomy would, of
course, accord with The Waste Land.
The epigraph, in this regard, is something of a diversion. The Duke’s
words to Claudio, who has been falsely sentenced to death—“Thou hast not
youth nor age / But as it were an after dinner sleep / Dreaming of both”—
with their reference to the limbo in which Claudio ¤nds himself as he pre-
pares to meet his Maker, are not really very relevant to Gerontion’s state. For
unlike Claudio, Gerontion is not “dreaming of both” but is quite aware of
his condition, now, and what has brought him to it. Indeed, one could easily
dispense with this epigraph, which was originally the ¤rst of two, the other,
from Inferno xxxiii, 121–22, was Come il mi corpo stea / Nel mondo su, nulla
scienza porto (“How it stands with my body in the world above, I have no
knowledge”). This epigraph was excised in the poem’s second draft (see
Ricks, Invention of the March Hare 351), perhaps because Gerontion’s real
concern is with the state not of his body in the world above but of his soul
in the world below.
Early readers, not understanding the use of found text, which is now such
a common technique in poetic composition, thought the “stealing” of lines
from A. C. Benson indicated a lack of originality on Eliot’s part. But what is,
on the contrary, so remarkable is that Eliot could take a fairly neutral passage
like Benson’s, delete the words “blind” and “country” as redundant, and
change “he sits” to the immediacy of “Here I am.” He also transforms the
sound structure of Benson’s fairly labored prose sentence:
/ /\ / || / / | / /
Here I am, an old man in a dry month,
/ / | /\ / || / /
Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.^13These lines are so familiar that we sometimes forget just how strange they
are. The opening announcement “Here I am,” for example, is intention-
ally misleading, for we never learn where “here” is or indeed who it is that
is declaring “I am.”^14 Is the voice of line 1 the same who says in line 55, “I
Eliot’s “Gerontion” 25