ghostly frozen landscape, the little white gull cannot ¤ght the wind and col-
lapses in a mass of “white feathers” in the snow. All that is ¤nally left, as the
poem’s speaker knows, is
/ /
Tenants of the house,
/ / / / /
Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.What is striking here is that the stress clusters, reminiscent of the poem’s
opening, are now unbroken by midline caesurae. The rhy thm merely ®ows,
weakly alluding to the agitated pace of “Here I am, || an old man | in a dry
month.” The game, Eliot suggests, is over.
Is “Gerontion” incoherent? Certainly not at the level of language and
rhy thm, where every word and phrase has its echo in the “wilderness of mir-
rors” of earlier or later strophes. Eliot moves easily between the concrete of
“Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians” and the abstract of “Gives too late /
What’s not believed in.” The tension between the two, which has bothered
numerous critics, seems quite intentional: only by exploring the tension be-
tween abstract/concrete, conceptual/perceptual, general/particular, can the
Voice of the poem come to terms with the reality of its situation.
What is that situation? At one pole, the poet who might have known
the mercy and grace of God, the Christian dispensation, has rejected it and
must hence live in a secular realm in which redemption is precluded. At the
other, more personal pole, Eliot presents himself as one who, having neither
been “at the hot gates / Nor fought in the warm rain,” turned to the literary
life of London and country houses, the life of English upper-class society,
which, as I remarked earlier, was hardly the society of “the Jew,” “Patched
and peeled in London”; or the society of Mr. Silvero with his cult of Limoges,
or Fräulein von Kulp, “one hand on the door”; or certainly not the oddly
named Fresca, who seems to have no family name at all and keeps company
with Mrs. Cammel, whose name sounds suspiciously Jewish. No, the society
Eliot frequented during the war years and their aftermath was the best “lit-
erary” society England had to offer. It was the bisexual “enlightened” society
of Bloomsbury, perhaps, that sullied the memory of the poet’s own private
savior, the romantic young Frenchman named Jean Verdenal and all he stood
for. And it was further a society that all too off handedly rejected the Christ
of the Gospels. Bertrand Russell, for example, was a con¤rmed atheist, and
Bloomsbury generally made fun of Christian faith as hopelessly childish
Eliot’s “Gerontion” 37