the great war and modernist poetry —includes, in the reference to Agamemnon, a closural event prepared in advance
bythe Greek epigraph, which Eliot has taken from Aeschylus’s tragedyAgamemnon.
There the soldier returning from the TrojanWar cries out as he is stabbed by his
scheming wife Clytemnestra—a feminine menace that Eliot also reflects in his
poem in the threat that these various ‘nightingales’ (the word, in French, is slang
for prostitutes) present to the male protagonist. Could Agamemnon really be the
heroic prototype of Sweeney?^22 His ape neck might equip him with a gift for simian
mimicry, but it hardly enables him to resemble the Hellenic hero credibly.
Why devise this parallelmanqu ́e? The meaning of Eliot’s framing action may
lie not in the content it organizes but in the gesture it represents—specifically, in
the empty gesture it presents, where the epigraph and last stanza join to promise
a formal logic that is not embodied in the poem’s centralmise-en-sc`ene.This
absence is amplified through the rhythm particular to the quatrain, which appears
driven, inexorably as ever, but by a premiss as contradictory as Sweeney’s claim to
heroic fame. Yet the Home Front to which this soldier has returned also preserves
a memory of equally compromised rationales for the nobility of that military
enterprise, a failure Eliot echoes and answers through the ramifying irony of the
poem’s structural conception.
The culmination of Eliot’s direct engagement with the historical and political
event of the war comes in the poem he composed at the moment of its official
conclusion. ‘Gerontion’ took shape through July 1919.^23 This was the month during
which the ‘peace’ treaty was being finalized at Versailles, an event to which the
poem makes several decisive references.
Eliot’s speaker represents the substance of the monologue disquisition in its
conclusion as ‘small deliberations’—small, presumably, becauseGerontionmeans,
specifically, alittleold man. Where he expands these ‘small deliberations’, in his
mind’s eye, to ‘multiply variety|In a wilderness of mirrors’, however, the poet
is conveying a larger circumstance as the framing occasion of the poem’s event.
He is imaging the scene in which the ‘deliberations’ of (supposedly) ‘great men’
have recently taken place—in the Great Hall of Mirrors of the Trianon Palace at
Versailles. If the ‘wilderness ofmirrors’ secures this allusion, an irony special to
the history being inscribed at Versailles lies in that otherwise unlikely figure of
‘wilderness’. This royal estate stood originally as a monument to Enlightenment
civilization, since its reflecting halls and formal gardens mapped a scheme of
metred and reasoned degree to the rationalist-deist plan of the universe. The
emblematic edifice of this first Age of Reason is overshadowed now by the
(^22) The late addition of the Greek epigraph—it is not included in the penultimate draft of the
poem—suggests that the heroic parallel comes to Eliot as a second thought, which he includes to
complicate the hermeneutic of Sweeney; see the summary of the manuscript evidence by Ricks in
Inventions of the March Hare, 381.
(^23) Eliot, ‘Gerontion’, inComplete Poems and Plays, 37–9. Eliot mentions the poem as ‘this new one,
‘‘Gerontion’’ ’, on 9 July 1919, in a letter to John Rodker, inLetters of T. S. Eliot, i. 312.