Having told John Rodker of some poems and “one half-finished one” on 1 June 1919, TSE sent Gerontion to Rodker on 9 July. Seven days later he thanked Sydney Schiff “for your great kindness in analysing my poem so carefully”, repeating on 25 July that he was “appreciative of your careful study of Gerontion”. After apparently sending the poem to Mary Hutchinson on 9 July, he wrote again on 6 Aug: “Please send Gerontion back to me at once. I leave Saturday night, and I must revise it in France, so just put it in an envelope and send it by return.” Wyndham Lewis wrote to John Quinn, 3 Sept, that he was planning a third issue of Blast (which never appeared), to include “a long, new poem by Eliot”. Quinn wrote to TSE, 29 Sept, that he had had a letter “a few days ago in which Lewis spoke of your having written a new long poem · · · if that new long poem is finished you might send a copy of it to Knopf at once and tell him where it should appear in the volume” (US 1920). TSE had sent Gerontion to Quinn the previous day: “I had several articles promised that I had to write, and so did not have time to alter the poem which I enclose.” (It is not clear whether this means that he had only just found time to revise it, or still had not done so.) For Pound’s trenchant pencilled suggestions on ts2, see Textual History.
[Poem I 31–33 · Textual History II 339–41]
Vassar Miscellany News 10 May 1933, reporting TSE’s reading at the college three days previously: “With Gerontion, a poem of old age, Mr. Eliot began to use, in his spoken comments, the method which he employed for the notes in The Waste Land. Notes are needed because of the allusiveness and the borrowings of the poem. He specified quotations from A. C. Benson, from Lancelot Andrewes’s sermons, from The Education of Henry Adams. Then there were references to specific people whose biographies would only confuse the issue, were the reader to know those biographies.”
To Seán Ó’Faoláin, 21 Feb 1944: “The poem was written a good many years ago, and in a way in which I do not think I write now. Any attempt to explain a poem like that · · · is inevitably an ex post facto rationalisation. It may certainly be what the poem ‘means’, so long as that is not identified with what the author is supposed to have consciously meant when he wrote it. So far as that goes, it can only be said to have been the expression of a mood, its variations and associated or evoked memories; and in the construction of the poem (the mental operation of writing it) no intellectual generalisation appears. ‘Old age’ may of course be taken as ‘the symbol of a declining civilisation’; but I wasn’t thinking about declining civilisations when I wrote it. And critics sometimes assume that one composes a poem by exactly the same process at every period of one’s life. It seems to me that there is a considerable change in my own methods, as a result of the exercise I got in experimenting for the stage.”
To Diana Captain, 3 Jan 1945, replying to a request for information for her university entrance paper: “The only thing I can say is that it is an attempt to build up an impression of old age, but the old age of a particular man about whom nothing further is known, looking back on his past. If the examiners think that is not enough you can tell them that it is all I can say, so I don’t see why you should say any more.”
Lehmann on a reading at Bryn Mawr in Oct 1948: “He defined Gerontion as a kind of preliminary stage to The Waste Land, from which he read out the fifth part What the Thunder Said.”
To Grover Smith, 4 July 1949, about the names (in reply to speculations in Explicator Feb 1949 and in a letter of 1 June 1949): “As for the etymologies you drive me to dispair. Anybody nowadays has the right to attribute anything he likes to anyone else’s unconscious and if you choose to think that I knew all these etymologies you are at liberty to do so. All I can say is that these names came to me spontaneously as suitable for certain persons whom I had known. And that I don’t bother myself in the least about etymology. Certainly the lady Fresca had nothing whatever in common that I can discern with Francesca da Rimini.”
Symons 155–56, translating Maeterlinck:
“I have come to believe,” he writes, in Le Tragique Quotidien, “that an old man seated in his armchair, waiting quietly under the lamplight, listening without knowing it to all the eternal laws which reign about his house, interpreting without understanding it all that there is in the silence of doors and windows, and in the little voice of light, enduring the presence of his soul and of his destiny · · · I have come to believe that this motionless old man lived really a more profound, human, and universal life than the lover who strangles his mistress, the captain who gains a victory, or the husband who ‘avenges his honour’.”
[Poem I 31–33 · Textual History II 339]
Title] “The title means ‘little old man’, a diminutive of γέρων”, Excerpts from Lectures 1932–1933. (Immediately following “T. S. E.” at the foot of American Literature (1919), in Athenæum 25 Apr 1919, is “PORTRAIT OF A LITTLE LADY”, a review of My War Experiences in Two Continents by S. Macnaughtan; see note to 3–4.) Pronounced with a hard g in TSE’s recording, as recommended by Fowler “Greek G”: “There is something to be said for retaining the hard sound of g even before e, i, & y, in such Greek-derived works as are not in popular but only in learned, technical or literary use. To those who know some Greek the sound of · · · jĕrontŏ'krasĭ (gerontocracy) · · · either obscures the meaning · · · or · · · is still repulsive.” Grover Smith 1996 102: “Named for the Roman general Gerontius, Gerontion shares with his prototype the knowledge of past inaction. Just as Gerontius (in AD 396) failed to mount a proper defense with his army against the onrushing Goths, led by Alaric, at Thermopylae · · · so Eliot’s Gerontion did not fight at the ‘hot gates’ of his own generation’s war.” See note to 71. Newman’s The Dream of Gerontius begins “JESU MARIA—I am near to death, | And Thou art calling me; I know it now.” (See notes to 59 and to East Coker II 16–17.) Newman’s poem was the basis of Elgar’s choral work of 1900, of which the Angels’ Chorus was performed in the Unitarian Church of the Messiah, St. Louis, in 1904 (Crawford 2015 68).
Unadopted title Gerousia: “at Sparta, the council of elders composed of the two kings and twenty-eight other members over 60 years of age, elected for life · · · as a judicial body they heard cases involving death, exile, or disenfranchisement and could even put the kings on trial”, The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature.
Epigraph] TSE in Thayer’s AraVP: “Measure for Measure”. The speech (III i) of the Duke, disguised as a Friar, is also echoed at 59 (see note):
Friend hast thou none.
For thine own bowels which do call thee sire,
The mere effusion of thy proper loins,
Do curse the gout, serpigo, and the rheum
For ending thee no sooner. Thou hast nor youth, nor age
But as it were an after-dinner’s sleep
Dreaming on both; for all thy blessed youth
Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms
Of palsied eld: and when thou art old and rich,
Thou hast neither heat, affection, limb, nor beauty
To make thy riches pleasant.
[Poem I 31 · Textual History II 339]
The epigraph as printed by TSE is not quite accurate (“after dinner” for “after-dinner’s”, “of” for “on”). (TSE to G. K. Chesterton, 6 July 1928: “The last time that I ventured to quote from memory in print, a correspondent · · · pointed out that I had made twelve distinct mistakes in well-known passages of Shakespeare.” To John Hayward, 14 Feb 1941: “The something, gout, serpigo and the rheum | Shall call thee something or other.” Stress: ser-pì-go.) Measure for Measure was the “mature play” that TSE asked participants in his 1918 extension lectures to read (Schuchard 1974). On an Old Vic production: “The opportunity to see a play—and a very great play—of Shakespeare which is so rarely produced should be enough of an attraction; but it has been also an opportunity to see some very fine acting · · · even those whose principles prevent them from approving either the subject-matter or the profoundly Christian spirit of t
he play might profit by seeing it so very well performed”, letter to the Editor, The Times, 14 Dec 1933. The epigraph to Tennyson’s poem about the occupant of a decayed house, Mariana, adapts a line from the same play (Musgrove 41–42). nor youth nor age · · · an after dinner sleep | Dreaming: Edgar Lee Masters: “nor youth’s delight, nor manhood’s power”, “the chair · · · the accustomed sleep”, O Glorious France (McCue 2014a). Dreaming: Spenser: “As one then in a dreame, whose dryer braine | Is tost with troubled sights and fancies weake”, The Faerie Queene I i 42 (TSE: “dry brain”, 75) (John M. Major, MLN Jan 1959).
Unadopted second epigraph Come il mi[o] corpo stea | Nel mondo su, nulla scienza porto: [How my body stands in the world above, I have no knowledge], Inf. XXXIII 121–22 (Friar Alberigo tells how, because he betrayed his guests, his soul was taken while he lived).
1–5] TSE in Thayer’s AraVP: “cf. Ezra Pound’s The Wayfarer”. This was a slip for The Seafarer (see note to 71–73), conflating it with The Wanderer, another of the Old English poems in the Exeter Book. To Mary Hutchinson, [9 July? 1919]: “of course you are unjust to Pound. One must learn to appreciate his ‘literary-appreciative’ style as a medium for expressing something of his own. And I think the Cathay and the Seafarer in Ripostes are wonderfully good.”
1 Here I am: to Eleanor Hinkley, 26 July 1914, two days before the outbreak of war: “Mit freundlichem Gruss aus Deutschland! [With friendly greetings from Germany!] Here I am, safely out of harm’s way”, opening of the letter.
1–2 Here I am · · · in a dry month, | Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain: “The line quoted from Gerontion was lifted bodily from a Life of Edward FitzGerald—I think the one in the ‘English Men of Letters’ series”, On a Recent Piece of Criticism (1938). A. C. Benson: “Here he sits, in a dry month, old and blind, being read to by a country boy, longing for rain: ‘Last night when Miss Tox was just coming, like a good Soul, to ask about the ruined Dombey, we heard a Splash of Rain, and I had the Book shut up, and sat listening to the Shower by myself—till it blew over, I am sorry to say, and no more of the sort all night. But we are thankful for that small mercy’”, Edward FitzGerald (1905) 142, quoting FitzGerald to W. Aldis Wright [25 May 1880] (Morton Zabel, Matthiessen 73–74). Having strained his eyes, FitzGerald “employed his disability like the ancient blind philosopher, puero ut uno esset comitatior. His protégé, Alfred Smith, the son of a farmer at the Hall farm, was now a big boy, and FitzGerald engaged him to come up in the evenings and read to him”, Benson 33 (quoting Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations V on Asclepiades, who was asked about the frustrations of blindness and answered “the expense of another servant”). See note to 12–15. The Supplementary Reading list for TSE’s extension lectures included W. A. Wright’s Letters of Edward FitzGerald and recommended the English Men of Letters as “the best series of biography”, Syllabus: Modern English Literature (1916). To John Hayward, 3 Apr 1940, of a dinner guest: “There was also a small dry prematurely old young man, whose name I didn’t catch.”
1, 7, 17, 59 an old man in a · · · decayed house · · · a sign · · · smell: “An old man in a house is a good sign”, “That house is happy which smells of an old man”, Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs. TSE: “I am the old house | With the noxious smell and the sorrow before morning, | In which all past is present, all degradation | Is unredeemable. As for what happens— | Of the past you can only see what is past, | Not what is always present. That is what matters”, The Family Reunion I i.
[Poem I 31–33 · Textual History II 339–41]
1, 15, 31, 72 an old man · · · an old man · · · an old man · · · an old man: Wilfred Owen’s The Parable of the Old Man and the Young (wr. 1918, pub. 1920) expressed the widespread belief that old men safe at home had sacrificed a generation in the Great War.
1, 59, 73 dry month · · · I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch · · · To a sleepy corner: Laforgue: “O monde de satisfaits, vous êtes dans la béatitude aveugle et silencieuse, et nous, nous desséchons de fringales supra-terrestres. Et pourquoi les antennes de nos sens, à nous, ne sont-elles pas bornées par l’Aveugle, et l’Opaque et le Silence, et flairent-elles au-delà de ce qui est de chez nous? Et que ne savons-nous aussi nous incruster dans notre petit coin pour y cuver l’ivre-mort de notre petit Moi?” [O world of the satisfied, you live in blind and silent blessedness, and we only dry up in super-terrestrial pangs of hunger. Why aren’t the antennae of our senses bounded by Blindness, Opacity, and Silence? Why must our senses go hunting about outside of us? Why can’t we incrust ourselves in our little corners to sleep off the drunken deaths of our own little Egos?], Salomé II (Roberta Morgan and Albert Wohlstetter, Harvard Advocate Dec 1938).
3 the hot gates: “Thermopylae”, TSE in Thayer’s AraVP (pointing out that his phrase is a literal translation; it derives from the local hot springs, supposed entrances to Hades). At the battle in 480 BC, a small Greek force held back the Persians for three days. TSE, responding to a call for Christians to oppose unemployment in the spirit of “Holy War”: “we are not mustered for a mere Thermopylae, but for an active and aggressive campaign with no end”, Full Employment and the Responsibility of Christians (1945). On imaginative re-creation: “A similar method might be used by an historian, so steeped in Greek history as to see Thermopylæ as he has seen events in his own life, in order to make his readers realise those events”, Thinking in Verse (1930). To Hayward [11 June 1940] on Defence of the Islands: “Is it too much like the epitaph of the Lacedemonians after Marathon? Thermopylae? I thought that if the resemblance seeped in to the minds of the better educated American readers, they might draw for themselves the analogy of these people in the pictures keeping the gates for them.” For another battle from the classical world, see The Waste Land [I] 70, “‘You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!’”
3–4 the hot gates | Nor fought: Marvell: “rough strife, | Thorough the iron gates of life”, To His Coy Mistress 43–44. (“the war unlocked the gates of Life · · · the war came to her, locking the gates of life”, review of Miss Macnaughtan’s war memoir: see note to title.)
3–5 I was neither · · · Nor · · · Nor: “neither stand nor lie nor sit”, The Waste Land [V] 340. To E. M. Forster, 10 Aug 1929: “The War crippled me as it did everyone else; but me chiefly because it was something I was neither honestly in nor honestly out of.” (“I was neither | Living nor dead”, The Waste Land [I] 39–40.)
[Poem I 31–33 · Textual History II 339–41]
4–6 Nor fought in the warm rain | Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass, | Bitten by flies, fought: Tennyson: “from heat to heat, | On stony drought and steaming salt · · · knee-deep in mountain grass”, Mariana in the South 39–42 (Musgrove 42). James Thomson: “I fret ’neath gnat-stings, an ignoble prey, | While others with a sword-hilt in their grasp | Have warm rich blood to feed their latest gasp”, Twenty-third Birthday 78–80 (Crawford 50–51). knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass: Sidney Lanier: “marsh-grass, waist-high, broad in the blade”, The Marshes of Glynn 57.
7 My house is a decayed house: Hawthorne: “she saw again her native village, in Old England, and her paternal home; a decayed house of gray stone, with a poverty-stricken aspect, but retaining a half-obliterated shield of arms over the portal, in token of antique gentility”, The Scarlet Letter ch. 2. TSE to Geoffrey Curtis, 20 Oct 1943: “Hawthorne is, I think, about the best prose writer America produced. In my own opinion, The House of the Seven Gables is a greater book than The Scarlet Letter and I think the best that he ever wrote. Perhaps I am not a fair judge. It must mean more to me for traditional reasons than it would to an English reader. Hawthorne’s background is so much the same as mine both in physical and theological environment. As a matter of fact, his first ancestor in America and mine both engaged in the pursuit of hanging witches in Salem.” TSE’s ancestor Andrew Eliott (1627–1703/4), who had emigrated from East Coker to escape persecution (see note to Little Gidding III 26),
became a juror in the Salem witch trials, 1692, and was a signatory to the Declaration of Regret for Part Taken in Salem Witchcraft, Circulated and Signed by the Jurors: “we confess that we ourselves were not capable to understand, nor able to withstand the mysterious delusions of the powers of darkness and Prince of the air”. (See note to The Waste Land [III] 310–11, and Walter Graeme Eliot’s A Sketch of the Eliot Family [1887] 19–20.)
Joyce: “Houses of decay, mine, his and all”, Ulysses episode III (Proteus) in Little Review May 1918 (Stephen Romer, personal communication). TSE to Marguerite Caetani, 21 Jan 1930: “We have not found moving into a flat beneficial either in health or in any other way, and are on the point of taking another house—a ‘decayed house’ but I believe a good one.” “Houses rise and fall”, East Coker I 2.
8 the Jew squats [jew until 1963]: Pope: “ev’ry child hates Shylock, tho’ his soul | Still sits at squat, and peeps not from its hole”, Moral Essays: Epistle I. To Richard Temple, Viscount Cobham 114–15 (Julius 29). For the use of “the Jew” to disparage all Jews while permitting the defence that only a particular Jew is meant, see Ricks, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice (1988) ch. II, “Anti-Semitism”.
8–9 squats · · · Spawned: see Beddoes, “Squats · · · A bodiless childfull of life”, in note to Animula 1.
[Poem I 31 · Textual History II 339–40]
8–10 the Jew · · · estaminet of Antwerp, | Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London: Marlowe: “In Florence, Venice, Antwerp, London, Seville, | Frankfort, Lubeck, Moscow, and where not, | Have I debts owing”, The Jew of Malta IV i. Apollinaire: “Elle se mettait sur la paille | Pour un maquereau roux et rose | C’était un juif il sentait l’ail | Et l’avait venant de Formose | Tirée d’un bordel de Changai” [She lay down on the straw for a redhaired rosy pimp, it was a Jew, he smelt of garlic, he had her coming from Formosa plucked from a Shanghai brothel], Marizibill 8–10, in Alcools (1913). TSE: “the metic, like the Jew, can only thoroughly naturalize himself in cities”, Why Rural Verse (1925). (OED “metic”: “A resident alien in a Greek city, having some of the privileges of citizenship.”) estaminet of Antwerp: André Salmon: “C’est à l’Estaminet de l’Etoile Polaire” [It’s at the Estaminet of the Pole Star], Anvers [Antwerp] in Le Calumet (1910). Salmon had influenced TSE’s Embarquement pour Cythère (1910) and Interlude in London (1911); writing of poets in France, TSE praised him to Scofield Thayer, 14 Feb 1920, as among “the most important men there”. In Contemporary French Poetry (1952), he named Salmon among the “significant figures of the twenties”. Antwerp: thanks to its port and efficient banking, the centre of world trade in the 16th century, when policies of toleration attracted a large foreign and Jewish populations. The city was held by various powers, but declined over succeeding centuries. As a Belgian fortress in 1914, it was regarded as impenetrable, but was overwhelmed after a short siege and occupied by the Germans until the end of the war. For Ford Madox Ford’s war poem Antwerp, see note to Burnt Norton II 3–5, 12–13. Brussels · · · London: Salmon: “Les Belges · · · les Anglais”, Anvers 17. As TSE has an international mélange, Salmon’s poem had un Français de Paris, deux chauffeurs de Hambourg, les Russes, Sébastopol, Nagazaki, les Antilles, Singapoor, Chine, Perou.
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 50
