ing the candles,” not, as one might expect, at the church altar, but in “the
dark room.” Is it a séance? And who is to be raised from the dead instead of
Christ? Fräulein von Kulp’s movements are especially mysterious: she only
“turned in the hall, one hand on the door.” Will she run into Mr. Silvero in
this “cunning passage”? Is she leaving the séance or about to participate in
one? We never ¤nd out, for now Eliot gives us the biblical statement: “Vacant
shuttles / Weave the wind” (an allusion to Job’s “My days are swifter than a
weaver’s shuttle, and are spent without hope. Oh remember that my life
is wind” [Job 7:6–7]), followed by the curious confession that “I have no
ghosts,” and then the refrain “An old man in a draughty house / Under a
windy knob.”
The passage leads up to the dramatic question that has since taken on a
life of its own: “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?” Ironically, the
immediate question these words evoke is not about forgiveness but about
knowledge. For what can the knowledge be that has produced such a conun-
drum? What is it Gerontion knows that demands forgiveness? I believe that
the “Depraved May” passage contains many hints, buried in the very fabric
of the language. “Depraved,” for starters, contains the paragram pray. It is
the refusal to pray, the absence of prayer in this remembered scene, that
has made the poet’s May so “depraved.” “Judas” contains the syllable “jew,”
which is to say that the eating, dividing, and drinking going on here might
have been the real sacrament rather than its debasement into “®owering ju-
das.” The “whispers” in line 23 are literally enacted in the sequence “whis-
pers” / “Mister” / “Silvero,” and the hissing s is carried over into “caressing.”
Because Gerontion’s story has never been inscribed on the loom of history,
because the shuttles remain vacant, there is little to go by. The poet, more-
over, doesn’t want exposure, and so he avoids all lessons the past might pro-
vide. And the “draughty” house is also the house of “drought.”
But of course Gerontion does have his ghosts. Consider this passage:
After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
(ll. 34–37)Again, let us ask: what does Gerontion know that makes it so dif¤cult for him
to forgive himself? To begin with, he had a chance to know Christ, to partake
of His body and blood, to take Communion, but somehow he refused. Ac-
Eliot’s “Gerontion” 35