The seventeenth-century divines loved to preach about the supreme wonder of infinity incarcerated in a finite prison, of the one who swaddled the sea being swaddled in baby clouts. At the center is the physician, the Word, enveloped in obscurity. To them the ritual meal is no "communion" but a cannibal "dividing." Given the idealist historicism that Eliot inherited from Bradley, history cannot possibly be an "other," separated from the self who conceives it. Therefore the Word ("Logos", the Word of God, and Jesus Christ) remains hidden "in darkness". "Gerontion" describes only "the unstilled world," the turning wheel, the hollow passages--not "the Garden / Where all love ends," the ending of lust and the goal of love. Joining the natural brothers are many half brothers, audacious upstarts who irreversibly alter Abraham's line. "Swaddled in darkness" also harks back to Conrad's Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. Thou hast nor youth nor age But as it were an after dinner sleep Dreaming of both. Gerontion Eliot, Thomas Stearns (1888 - 1965) Original Text: T. S. Eliot, Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1920): 13-16. In the second stanza of "Gerontion," Eliot's use of Andrewes's sermon superimposes this more inclusive house of Israel, the Christian Church. The mysterious foreign figures who rise shadow-like in his thoughts--Mr. Silvero, Hakagawa, Madame de Tornquist, Fräulein von Kulp--are the inheritors of desolation. If any notion remained that in the poems of 1919 Eliot was sentimentally contrasting a resplendent past with a dismal present, "Gerontion" should have helped to dispel it. Eliot’s Negative Way. That is precisely what Gerontion cannot do. Even nature is an "ideal construction" for Eliot, a fabrication of the mind: in his essay on Tennyson's In Memoriam (1936) he writes of "that strange abstraction, 'Nature.'" What are contrasted in this poem are the secular history of Europe, which the life of Gerontion parallels, and the unregarded promise of salvation through Christ. "The tiger springs in the new year" makes "springs" a syllepsis, or pun, meaning both "arises like a rejuvenating spring" and "pounces like a murderous animal." E546 A753 1920a Fisher Rare Book Library. Neither fear nor courage saves us. Eliot's substitution of the word "history" emphasizes what his persona in "Gerontion" does not understand: that history is not something separate from the life of the individual in the present.This stanza relocates readers, giving them a far more inclusive vantage point. But the poem provides no continuing determinate scene or narrative within which such lines can confidently be placed, though there are sporadic indications of possible scenes and narratives. Gerontion By T. S. Eliot. who turned seductively in the hallway; or the mystical Madame de Tornquist (a tourniquet, or screw for stopping blood?). He states the modern condition of human being mechanized and running here and there with their cold heart. "Gerontion" points no way inward; it shows the outward, the eccentric propulsion of the damned, who, as Chaucer says, echoing the Somnium Scipionis, "Shul whirle aboute th'erthe alwey in peyne." In the incident quoted above, Christ gave two signs of his divinity. How can we redeem the past? Someone has remarked that Eliot's obsessive image is the abyss. They are fabrications compelled by a desire for order. Word not able to speak a word; a wonder sure and . This world of his youth seems to be symbolized in the mysterious foreign figures who rise up like the ghosts from a Witch’s cauldron: Silvero, Hakagawa, “Bowing among the Titians”, Madme de Tornquist, Fraulein von Gulp. Think What are some of the main points or ideas in the poem "Gerontion" by T.S. The principal tenants in this vision of the house of Israel are the Pharisees, Christ, and pulling together nineteen hundred years of history, the landlord squatting on the window sill of Europe. Thou hast nor youth nor age. The point at which time ends and eternity begins, at which history disappears in unity and the winding spiral vanished in the Word, is lost to the world of the poem. Gives too soonFrom Harmony of Dissonances: T.S. In the case of Jesus of Nazareth, the tenant of the body is a god; the house, therefore, is much more than a house--it is a temple. The word "Swaddled" may refer to the child Jesus swaddled in a 'manger in Bethlehem. He that takes the sea Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994.Here Gerontion has quoted St. Matthew's report of the pharisees' challenge to Christ ("We would see a sign!") The conversational language is not sustained, for instance, in the lines that follow the opening ones in "Gerontion": Signs are taken for wonders. "From Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot, and the Sense of the Past. "Depraved May," the season of denial or crucifixion, returns whenever, in whatever age, apostolic or modern, the life of sense stirs without love. Two years after it was … "Then certain of the scribes and of the Pharisees answered, saying, Master, we would see a sign from thee.
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