“dull head among windy spaces” that has been our guide thus far, there is no
real distinction between these voices. Indeed, the poet himself is a Pharisee,
whose passivity and inability to act or even think (“Think now” will become
a major motif in this poem) causes “Signs” to become so essential. Mean-
while “the word within a word, unable to speak a word” remains unheard,
“Swaddled in darkness.” The long thirteen-syllable line, run over into the
next foreshortened one, creates the explosion of
/ / /
Came Christ the tigerwhere the alliteration of the k sound yields to the assonance of “Christ” and
“tiger”—the two becoming immediately seen as one.
And now, without transition, the poem shifts from the image of Geron-
tion’s general condition and the Christian admonition that follows to a par-
ticular surreal scene:
In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, ®owering judas,
To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk
Among whispers; by Mr. Silvero
With caressing hands, at Limoges
Who walked all night in the next room;
By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians;
By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room
Shifting the candles; Fräulein von Kulp
Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door.
Vacant shuttles
Weave the wind. I have no ghosts,
An old man in a draughty house
Under a windy knob.In the passage from The Education of Henry Adams to which the ¤rst line
alludes (see Southam 44), “dogwood and chestnut, ®owering judas” represent
the lush, sensual vegetation of the Washington-area landscape so unfamiliar
to a New Englander. Eliot, it is generally assumed, parodied Adams’s ecstatic
description so as to set the scene for the ghostly parody of the sacrament in
the modern world—a kind of Black Mass. The “dry month” of line 1 is now
a “depraved May,” and the reference to “judas” points back, of course, to the
betrayal of Christ.
Eliot’s “Gerontion” 33