/ / || /
Bitten by ®ies, fought.Lines 3 and 4, with their matched stresses on “hot gates” and “warm rain,”
are curiously resonant. “Hot gates” (Thermopylae) is an allusion to the battle-
¤elds of World War I, where Eliot longed to serve, especially after the United
States entered the war in 1917. In a letter to his father (4 November 1918), the
poet, who had been disquali¤ed for active duty because of physical disabili-
ties, including a hernia,^16 relates the strenuous—almost comic—efforts he
made to get a commission in Naval Intelligence or in the Interpreter’s Corps,
commissions for which he was rejected despite a string of recommendations
from men in high places (see ll. 246–49). This was evidently a great blow to
the poet, who was anxious to persuade his father of his patriotism and will-
ingness to engage in action. When Henry Ware Eliot died suddenly two
months later (7 January 1919), without having any sense that his son would
become a famous poet, the young Eliot was literally distraught (see ll. 267ff.).
“Gerontion” was begun shortly afterward and takes into account that the
poet quite literally missed out on the “hot gates” as well as the “warm” or
life-giving rain that would have signi¤ed his baptism into a true manhood,
an engagement with the trials of wading “knee deep in the salt marsh.” Nor
has the speaker come to terms with sexual maturity: “I was neither at the hot
gates” refers not only to war but also to the disaster of Eliot’s marriage to
Vivien, in which no “heat” was ever generated.
But what is perceived in life as a painful failure becomes the occasion for
a poetic, especially a rhy thmic, triumph. The impact of the word “fought,”
put forward rather quietly in line 4—“Nor fought in the warm rain”—is held
in suspension in the progress of the long irregular alexandrine of line 5—
“Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,” a line enjambed so that
the reader pushes on for another four strongly accented syllables—“Bitten by
®ies”—only to come to the caesura, followed by the reappearance of the iso-
lated verb fought. The alliterative “flíes || foúght” is something of a tongue
twister; the verb, moreover, is now intransitive: it’s not just that Gerontion
refused to “¤ght” at one time or that he refused to ¤ght someone speci¤c;
rather, refusal seems to be his general condition. The self-reproach is inten-
si¤ed by the harsh fricative and voiceless stop that frame the long dipthong
of fought: the word is almost spit out.
To appreciate Eliot’s manipulation of sound, we might look at the opening
of “Gerontion” in the French translation of Pierre Leyris:
Me voici, un viellard dans un mois de sécheresse,
Écoutant ce garçon me lire, attendant la pluie.Eliot’s “Gerontion” 27