and antiquated. In this religious void, only “vacant shuttles weave the wind.”
And since Eliot can never reveal his real secret about Verdenal, he can only
turn to Christ, who will forgive all sins.
One of the wonders of “Gerontion” is thus how a deeply personal situa-
tion ¤nds its objective correlative so that the poem appears to be, in its later
passages, a disquisition about larger, impersonal issues, questions of history
and memory, sin and redemption. It is a matter of charging language with
meaning so that “depraved May” will readily reveal the power of what it
means to pray. Is “Gerontion” an anti-Semitic poem? No one could deny that
the three lines in question have a nasty, anti-Semitic cast. But does this mean
that the thrust of Eliot’s complex monologue is a slur on the Jews? Hardly.
For it is ¤nally a meditation in which critique is pointed inward. There is no
forgiveness, only the knowledge of how one has come to such a pass.
Like all good poems, “Gerontion” cannot be paraphrased; it cannot be de-
scribed as “about” an old man’s confused mind or “about” the refusal to take
Communion, or about the decay of religion in a secular world. All these mo-
tifs enter in, but the force of the poem depends on its extraordinary lan-
guage. Take the name De Bailhache in the last section, De Bailhache be-
ing one of those “whirled / Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear / In
fractured atoms.” De Bailhache is not a “proper” French surname; its parts
don’t cohere. But literally the name gives us the ¤rst syllable of bailler (to
yawn) plus hache (axe). An hache de guerre is a battle-axe or tomahawk; haché
means “minced” or “crushed,” as in bifteck haché, which is hamburger.
Bailhache as yawner looks ahead to the “sleepy corner” to which this per-
son and his friends will soon be driven. Bailhache as “battle-axe” or “toma-
hawk” is a variant on the cutlass the poet wishes he had heaved in the salt
marsh. Bailhache represents the hamburger one becomes when one’s proper
names seem to be at odds. And ¤nally the “De” is the most common of af-
fectations: the pre¤x designating an aristocratic connection.
All of these connotations obtain. But in line 68, De Bailhache is also an
anagram on the word delay that precedes it. And that is perhaps the most
intriguing suggestion of the proper name. Would that there were a delay for
De Bailhache, Fresca, and Mrs. Cammell, “whirled beyond the circuit of
the shuddering Bear / In fractured atoms”! Gerontion may tell us he has
no ghosts, but the poem knows better. In Eliot’s great phantasmagoria, the
ghosts are every where.
38 Chapter 2