cordingly, “The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours.” But there are
other forms of knowledge the poet refused. “Gerontion” was supposed to be
the prelude to The Waste Land, and there we read:
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
(Collected Poems 68)This passage is nicely glossed by the lines in “Gerontion,” “Gives too soon /
Into weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed with / Till the refusal
propagates a fear.” And again, the admonition is “Think.”
After such knowledge, what forgiveness? After having known what “blood
shaking my heart” could be, how could the poet have rejected love in the
interest of prudence? How could he have been so weak as to think he could
dispense with love, only to ¤nd himself a potential “old man” whose “refusal
propagates a fear”? Thinking, unfortunately, won’t change any thing.
These are the “ghosts” that haunt the Gerontion who tries to tell himself
that he has no ghosts:
I that was near your heart was removed therefrom
To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.
I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it
Since what is kept must be adulterated?
I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch:
How should I use them for your closer contact?
(ll. 55–61)These “Jacobean” lines make sense only if we take them to be both about
secular and spiritual love. What a poem says, as Jacques Roubaud puts it,
cannot be said any other way. The loss of the ¤ve senses in line 50 takes us
back to that earlier catalogue, “Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds”—items
threatening to the touch, to smell, taste, sight, and hearing—that constitute
the landscape when all that matters has been lost.
What is left is no more than a “wilderness of mirrors,” in which some
further humanoids—De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel—are “whirled /
Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear / in fractured atoms.” In this
36 Chapter 2