Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy

(sharon) #1

out of poor old Gerontion, is himself a squatter, a victim of poverty, misery,
and disease, a ¤gure who, in Julius’s words, “becomes what he expels.” Squat-
ting on the window sill, he belongs neither inside the “decayed house,” nor
can he escape its precincts. In a similar vein, Eliot’s misogyny, which will be
more openly declared in The Waste Land, is here displaced onto a nameless,
faceless, generic old woman, who “Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish
gutter” (note the remarkable use of the long e phoneme)—a sexless ¤gure
who is no more of a threat than the goat that “coughs at night in the ¤eld
overhead.” Note that there is no ®ock of goats in this ¤eld but only “the” goat,
on the analogy of “the” Jew and “the” woman. And this goat, a far cry from
Pan the goat god or the satyr of Greek my thology, does nothing but “cough,”
even as the woman does nothing but sneeze and poke. As the scapegoat of
Jewish my thology,^23 it is a ¤tting companion for Gerontion.
The key to this proto-surreal nightmare landscape, peopled by characters
devoid of humanity, is found in line 12—


/ || / || / /\ || / /\ || /
Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds—

where each noun in the poet’s catalogue is separate and emphatically sounded,
as in a roll call. The ¤rst four nouns, moreover, are phonemic variations on
the same o, r, and s sounds: stonecrop echoes rocks and moss, as does the sec-
ond syllable of iron.^24 But then comes a new vowel sound (e) and an even
nastier reference, this time to the shit (merds, from the French merde, here
rhyming with turds) that dominates the scene. By the time we come to the re-
frain, “I an old man / A dull head among windy spaces,”^25 the various occu-
pants of this arid stonecrop seem no more than a projection of the poet’s own
self-hatred and despair: Gerontion, the goat, the Jew, the woman who “keeps
the kitchen” and “sneezes at evening,” even the gutter, described in a trans-
ferred epithet as “peevish”—all are interchangeable. The woman “makes
tea,” the Jew “squats,” but the poet himself does nothing at all; he merely
exists, verbless, “a dull head among windy spaces.” Eliot’s winds have been
read as allusions to Dante’s ceaseless and aimless winds, to the biblical wind
that bloweth where it listeth and even, by Genesius Jones, to the Holy Spirit,
but I want to note here that contrary to Desmond MacCarthy’s caution that
we mustn’t take Eliot too literally, these windy spaces really are, ¤rst and fore-
most, just that—the winds blowing in the empty spaces of the in¤nite sky
over the “Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds” of Gerontion’s—more accu-
rately, the poet’s—mental landscape.
If the poem continued in this despairing vein, the scene might become


Eliot’s “Gerontion” 31

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