would meet you upon this honestly”? And what is the relation of rhy thm to
the speaker’s identity? To note, as have most of the commentaries, that in
“Gerontion” Eliot is adapting Jacobean blank verse,^15 doesn’t take us very far.
In dramas like Thomas Middleton’s Changeling, the major source for lines
55–61 of “Gerontion,” the line, however irregular, has ten syllables and an
iambic base, as in
/ / / / / \ /
But cast it to the ground regardlesslyor
/ / / / /
Was prophet to the rest, but ne’er believed.But although the ¤rst line of “Gerontion” has ten syllables, it breaks into
three rhy thmic units, and its ten monosyllables, all of them basic English
words, contain seven stresses broken by a caesura, so that any potential for-
ward thrust the line might have gives way to near-gridlock, in keeping with
the “Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season” of the poem’s ending.
The second line, again a pentameter, this time with an extra syllable, again
breaks into three groups, but it is more lightly stressed and foregrounds both
alliteration and assonance. Being and waiting: the two present participles
stress the suspension of Gerontion’s state of consciousness, its activity in
a continuous present in which all roles are reversed, boys reading to old
men rather than vice versa. The spiritual dryness of Gerontion is stressed
throughout the poem, but the reference to “month,” rather than “day” or
“week” or “year,” is by no means arbitrary. Like “depraved May” in line 21 or
“April is the cruelest month” in The Waste Land, the time reference, as in
Yeats’s A Vision, is to the lunar cycle, the repeat in history. In its tension be-
tween linear and cyclical time, between the linear life span and the possi-
bility of cyclical renewal, “Gerontion” also looks ahead to the Four Quartets.
In lines 3–6, even the ghost of pentameter gives way to a heavily stressed
free verse:
/ / /
I was neither at the hot gates
/ / /
Nor fought in the warm rain
/ / / / | / /
Nor k nee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass, >26 Chapter 2