Η δεύτερη ποιητική συλλογή του T.S.Eliot (Poems 1920), ξεκινά με το παρακάτω ποίημα. Συμβολικό, φιλοσοφικό, ουσιαστικό, αναλογικό. Το παραθέτω ίσως γιατί βρίσκω κάποιους συσχετισμούς με τους καιρούς που βιώνουμε.
GERONTION
Thou hast nor youth nor age
But as it were an after dinner sleep
Dreaming of both.
Here I am, an old man in a dry month
Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
I was neither at the hot gates
Nor fought in the warm rain
Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,
Bitten by flies, fought.
My house is a decayed house,
And the Jew on the window-sill, the owner,
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp ,
Blistered in Brussels , patched and peeled
in London .
The goat coughs at night in the field overhead;
Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.
The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea,
Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.
I an old man,
A dull head among windy spaces.
Signs are taken for wonders. "We would see a sign!"
The word within a word, unable to speak a word,
Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year
Came Christ the tiger
In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas,
To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk
Among whispers; by Mr. Silvero
With caressing hands, at Limoges
Who walked all night in the next room;
By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians;
By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room
Shifting the candles; Fraulein von Kulp
Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door. Vacant shuttles
Weave the wind. I have no ghosts,
An old man in a draughty house
Under a windy knob.
After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What's not believed in, or if still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon
Into weak hands, what's thought can be dispensed with
Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think
Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.
The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours. Think at last
We have not reached conclusion, when I
Stiffen in a rented house. Think at last
I have not made this show purposelessly
And it is not by any concitation
Of the backward devils.
I would meet you upon this honestly.
I that was near your heart was removed therefrom
To loose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.
I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it
Since what is kept must be adulterated?
I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch:
How should I use them for your closer contact?
These with a thousand small deliberations
Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,
Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,
With pungent sauces, multiply variety
In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do,
Suspend its operations, will the weevil
Delay? De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Camel, whirled
Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear
In fractured atoms. Gull against the wind, in the windy straits
Of Belle Isle, or running on the Horn.
White feathers in the snow, the Gulf claims,
And an old man driven by the Trades
To a sleepy corner.
Tenants of the house,
Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.
ΓΕΡΟΝΤΙΟΝ
Thou hast nor youth nor age
But as it were an after dinner sleep
Dreaming of both.1
Νάμαι λοιπόν, γέροντας
σε μήνα στέγνας,
Να μου διαβάζει ένα
παιδί, καθώς προσμένω τη βροχή.
Ποτέ δε βρέθηκα στις
πύλες τις θερμές
Μήτε πολέμησα κάτω από
χλιαρή βροχή
Μήτε μέχρι το γόνατο σε
βάλτους αρμυρούς, μιά κάμα ανεμίζοντας,
Μύγες να με τσιμπούν,
έδωσα μάχη.
Το σπιτικό μου σπιτικό
ερειπωμένο,
Και στο περβάζι του
παραθυριού ανακούρκουδα ο Εβραίος, ο ιδιοκτήτης,
Χαμένος στης Αμβέρσας
κάποιο καπηλιό,
Στις Βρυξέλλες τον
εβρίσαν, τον μπαλώσαν στο Λονδίνο και τον γδύσαν.
Βήχει τη νύχτα η κατσίκα
στον παρά πάνω αγρό.
Βράχια, μούσκλια,
αμάραντα, σίδερα, κοπριές.
Φροντίζει η γυναίκα την
κουζίνα, φκιάχνει το τσάι,
Φταρνίζεται τα βραδινά,
σκαλίζοντας το βουλωμένο κιούγκι.
Γέροντας εγώ,
Κεφάλι ξέθωρο σε τόπους
ανεμόδαρτους.
Σημάδια παίρνω γιά
θαύματα. "Θα δούμε ένα σημάδι!"
Η λέξη μέσα σε λέξη,
ανίκανος ν'αρθρώσω λέξη,
Φασκιωμένος σε σκοτάδι.
Αρχή χρονιάς
Ηρθε ο Χριστός ο τίγρης
Τον έκλυτο Μάη, κάστανα
και κρανιά, ανθισμένη κουτσουπιά,
Γιά να πιωθούν, να
φαγωθούν, να χωριστούν
Ανάμεσα σε ψίθυρους.
από τον κο Silvero
Με χέρια γαλίφικα, στη
Λιμόζ
Που περπατούσε ολονυχτίς
στην κάμαρα τη διπλανή.
Τον Hakagawa, πούσκυβε
ανάμεσα στους Τισιανούς.
Τη Madame de Tornquist,
στο σκοτεινό δωμάτιο
Που άλλαζε θέση στα
κεριά. τη Fraulein von Kulp
Που έστριψε στο χωλ, με
το'να χέρι της στην πόρτα. Σαϊτες αδειανές
Υφαίνουν τον αγέρα.
Φαντάσματα δεν έχω,
Ενας γέροντας σε σπίτι
που φυσάει από παντού
Κάτω από πόμολο που
μπάζει.
Μετά από τόση γνώση,
ποιά συγχώρεση; Στοχάσου τώρα
Πολλά περάσματα πανούργα
έχει η ιστορία, φκιαχτούς διαδρόμους
Και ζητήματα,
ψιθυρίζοντας φιλοδοξίες ξεγελά,
Καθοδηγεί με
ματαιότητες. Στοχάσου τώρα
Δίνει όταν η προσοχή μας
χαλαρώνει
Κι αυτό που δίνει, το
δίνει έτσι πονηρά μπλεγμένο
Ωστε από την προσφορά
λιμοκτονεί η επιθυμία. Δίνει πολύ αργά
Αυτό που χάθηκε σαν
πίστη, ή κι αν ακόμη το πιστεύουμε,
Στη μνήμη μοναχά,
αναθεωρημένο πάθος. Δίνει πολύ νωρίς
Σε χέρια αδύναμα, κείνο
που θαρρούν γιά περιττό
Ωσότου η απάρνηση
σκορπίζει φόβο. Στοχάσου
Μήτε φόβος, μήτε και
κουράγιο μας διασώζουν. Αχρειότητες
Γεννά ο ηρωισμός μας.
Αρετές
Μας επιβάλλουν τα ειδεχθή
εγκλήματά μας.
Αυτά τα δάκρυα είναι
καρποί του δέντρου της οργής.
Πηδά ο τίγρης στον
καινούριο χρόνο. Εμάς ρημάζει. Στοχάσου τελικά
Σε συμπέρασμα δεν
φτάνουμε, όταν εγώ
Ξυλιάζω σε νοικιασμένο
σπίτι. Στοχάσου τελικά
Δε στα είπα όλ' αυτά
χωρίς σκοπό
Κι ούτε με παρακίνησαν
σ' αυτό
Διάβολοι της πίσω
πόρτας.
Έντιμα πάνω σ' αυτό θα
σε ανταμώσω.
Εγώ, που στην καρδιά σου
είμουνα πλάι, διώχτηκα από κει
Κι έτσι έχασα την
ομορφιά στον τρόμο, τον τρόμο στο ιεροδικείο.
Έχασα το πάθος μου:
γιατί θα ‘πρεπε να το κρατήσω
Όταν εκείνο που
κρατιέται πρέπει απαραίτητα να νοθευτεί;
Έχασα την όραση, την
ακοή, την όσφρηση, τη γεύση, την αφή μου:
Πώς να τις χειριστώ για
να ‘ρθω πιo κοντά σου;
Αυτά, μαζί με χίλιες
άλλες μικροεπιφυλάξεις
Το κέρδος παρατείνουν
του ψυχρού τους παραμιλητού,
Διεγείρουν τη μεμβράνη,
όταν η αίσθηση έχει παγώσει,
Πολλαπλασιάζουν, με
καρυκεύματα πικάντικα, την ποικιλία
Στων κατόπτρων την
ερημιά. Τι θα κάμει η αράχνη,
Θ' αναρτήσει τον ιστό
της, άραγε το έντομο
Θ' αργήσει; De Bailhache,
Fresca, κα Camel, στροβιλίστηκαν
Πέρ'απ'της Αρκτου που
τρεμοσβύνει την περιοχή
Σε άτομα σπασμένα.
Γλάρος κόντρα στον άνεμο, στους ανεμόδαρτους πορθμούς
Του Bell Isle, ή
καταφεύγοντας στο Κέρας.
Η άβυσσος διεκδικεί, άσπρα
φτερά στο χιόνι
Και κάποιος γέροντας
οδηγημένος από ανέμους Αληγείς
Σε μια τεμπέλικη γωνιά.
Νοικάρηδες του σπιτικού,
Σκέψεις στεγνού μυαλού
σε στέγνας εποχή.
1. Δεν έχεις μήτε νιότη
μήτε ηλικία
Όμως σαν σε ύπνο ύστερ'απ'το φαγητό
Ονειρεύεσαι και τα δυό.
Κάποιες σημειώσεις πάνω στο ποίημα GERONTION του T.S.Eliot:
Grover Smith
The practice of
allusion, justified in "Burbank "
by the need to characterize the tourist, performs in "Gerontion" the
function of condensing into decent compass a whole panorama of the past. 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. 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. Gerontion
symbolizes civilization gone rotten. 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. Against them is set the
"word within a word, unable to speak a word"--the innocent Redeemer,
swaddled now in the darkness of the world. But Christ came not to send peace,
but a sword; the Panther of the bestiaries, luring the gentler beasts with His
sweet breath of doctrine, is also the Tiger of destruction. For the
"juvescence of the year," in which He came, marked the beginning of
our dispensation, the "depraved May" ever returning with the
"flowering judas" of man's answer to the Incarnation. And so
"The tiger springs in the new year," devouring us who have devoured
Him. Furthermore, the tiger becomes now a symbol not only of divine wrath but
of the power of life within man, the springs of sex which "murder and
create." "Depraved May," the season of denial or crucifixion,
returns whenever, in whatever age, apostolic or modern, the life of sense stirs
without love. Eliot's The Family Reunion repeats the horror:
"Is the spring not an evil time, that excites us with lying voices?" So
now it returns and excites the memories of Gerontion. The source of his
grief--the passionate Cross, the poison tree, "the wrath-bearing
tree"--is both the crucifixion yew tree and the death tree of the hanged
traitor, a token of Christ and Iscariot, redemption and the universal fall in Eden .
The futility of a world
where men blunder down the blind corridors of history, guided by vanity and
gulled by success, asserting no power of choice between good and evil but
forced into alternatives they cannot predict--this is the futility of a
labyrinth without an end. Someone has remarked that Eliot's obsessive image is
the abyss. It is not: it is the corridor, the blind street, the enclosure; the
"circular desert" and "the stone passages / Of an immense and
empty hospital," imprisoning the inconsolable heart. At the center is the
physician, the Word, enveloped in obscurity. But without is the abyss also,
yawning for those who in their twisted course have never found their center. "Gerontion"
points no way inward; it shows the outward, the eccentric propulsion
of the damned, who, as Chaucer says, echoing the SomniumScipionis, "Shul
whirle aboute th'erthe alwey in peyne." Alone in his corner, having
rested, unlike Ulysses, from travel (and indeed having never taken the highways
of the earth), the old man sits while the wind sweeps his world "Beyond
the circuit of the shuddering Bear / In fractured atoms." The opposite
movement, which discloses "a door that opens at the end of a
corridor," opening, as one reads in "Burnt Norton," "Into
the rose garden" and "Into our first world," leads to "the
still point of the turning world," where, as Eliot put it in Ash
Wednesday, "the unstilled world still whirled / About the centre
of the silent Word." "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. 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. Yet the Word exists; it is only history which cannot find Him, history
with a positivistic conception of the universe, a deterministic view of
causation, a pragmatic notion of morals. As Chesterton's Father Brown remarks,
"What we all dread most ... is a maze with no centre. That is why atheism
is only a nightmare." Eliot's symbol of the mazelike passages, or the
clocklike wheel of time, or the whirlwind of death, the gaping whirlpool, is
the antithesis of the single, unmoving, immutable point within. History is the
whirlwind, for history is of the world, and history like the world destroys all
that dares the test of matter and time.
From T.S.
Eliot’s Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1956.
Eloise Knapp Hay
From his draughty
windows Gerontion looks up a barren hill: once again the eye ascends in order
to descend into an abyss, reversing the motion of Dante and the Christian
saints who followed St. Augustine 's
"Descend that ye may ascend." Gerontion's mind wanders backward,
however, not upward—as far back as 480 B.C. and the battle of Thermopylae
(which translates as "hot gates"), then forward through a series of
wars that Gerontion feels would have compensated him if he had been there to
fight. He thinks of history as a system of corridors ingeniously contrived to
confuse and finally to corrupt the human race. History is a
"she"--like his old housekeeper, poking a clogged drain; also like
Fräulein von Kulp (for culpa?) who turned seductively in the
hallway; or the mystical Madame de Tornquist (a tourniquet, or screw for
stopping blood?). Like these women, history leads nowhere but to corruption.
She "gives too late or too soon," like a frustrating woman, and she
leaves her lover not only ill-at-ease but frightened. Heroic efforts to satisfy
the unclear demands of history have led to nothing but cruelty and hate. And
into this history "Came Christ the tiger."
Gerontion thinks of the
coming of Christ in two ways, first as a useless infant and then as a hunted
tiger. This part of the poem is usually misread because no one notes that Eliot
pointedly left the phrase borrowed from Lancelot Andrewes with "the
Word" uncapitalized. Thus in "Gerontion" we read only of
"The word within a word, unable to speak a word." Eliot knew what he
was about when he restored the capital in "A Song for Simeon" and
"Ash-Wednesday" (1930): "The Word within [the biblical] word,
unable to speak a word." As Gerontion reflects, the answer to the
Philistines' cry for a "sign" was disappointingly a
speechless child, who passed from winter darkness and swaddling clothes into a
"depraved" spring, when he was transformed into a ravening tiger--a
sacrificial beast which in contemporary life is hunted and eaten by bloodless
transients like the boarders Silvero, Hakagawa, Fräulein von Kulp, and Madame
de Tornquist. "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." In
John 6:52-58, Jesus says that those who take his body and blood to become one
with him in communion will live eternally, while those who reject him will die.
Gerontion concludes that this death-dealing doctrine came to devour those who
do not devour "the tiger," as do Gerontion's fellow boarders. To them
the ritual meal is no "communion" but a cannibal
"dividing." "After such knowledge," indeed, "what
forgiveness?"
From T.S.
Eliot’s Negative Way. Harvard University Press, 1982.
James Longenbach
Hugh Kenner has noticed
that Eliot's characterization of Senecan drama provides a fair description of
"Gerontion." In the Greek drama, says Eliot, "we are always
conscious of a concrete visual actuality," while in the plays of Seneca
"the drama is all in the word, and the word has no further reality behind
it." Part of the reason for the extraordinary difficulty of
"Gerontion" is its conspicuous lack of the concrete visual images
that illuminate even the most obscure passages of The Waste Land . "Gerontion"
is all talk.
Signs
are taken for wonders. "We would see a sign!"
The word within a word, unable to speak a word,
Swaddled with darkness.
The word within a word, unable to speak a word,
Swaddled with darkness.
Here Gerontion has
quoted St. Matthew's report of the pharisees' challenge to Christ ("We
would see a sign!") and has followed it with a line from Lancelot
Andrewes's Nativity Sermon on that text ("The word within a word, unable
to speak a word"). In his 1926 essay on Andrewes, Eliot remarks that
Andrewes is "extracting all the spiritual meaning of a text" in this
passage. That is precisely what Gerontion cannot do. Andrewes is talking about
the logos, the Word within the word. Gerontion's words have no metaphysical
buttressing, and his language is studded with puns, words within words. The
passage on history is a series of metaphors that dissolve into incomprehensibility:
History has many cunning
passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities.
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities.
Gerontion has already
described himself as "an old man in a draughty house," and his
"house" of history has its corridors and passages and issues. Written
histories also have "cunning passages," and historians write about
"Issues." Gerontion's history is also a woman:
She gives when our
attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What's not believed in, or if still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion.
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What's not believed in, or if still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion.
From Eliot's point of
view, this is merely self-deception. Given the idealist historicism that Eliot
inherited from Bradley, history cannot possibly be an "other,"
separated from the self who conceives it. By presenting history as something
other than an "ideal construction," a product of his own mind,
Gerontion shifts the blame for his own situation from himself onto history:
Gives too soon
Into weak hands, what's thought can be dispensed with
Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think
Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
Into weak hands, what's thought can be dispensed with
Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think
Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
Neither passive fear not
active courage will save us, says Gerontion, because history has duped us,
perverting our heroic intentions. Gerontion's understanding of history is a
rationalization of his own inability to act or feel. It is to his advantage to
be what Bradley calls an "uncritical historian" or what Eliot calls
an "imperfect critic."
Unlike Eliot, the
speaker of "Gerontion" does not understand that his knowledge of
history is his own "ideal construction," and that a vision of
historical chaos is a product of the mind that cannot unify the present and the
past. As I mentioned in the introduction, Eliot's drafts for
"Gerontion" show that the passage on history was finished in all but
one crucial point before other sections of the poem were given their final
forms. In his last revision, Eliot altered only one word: he substituted
"history" for "nature." Had the change not been made, our
sense of the entire poem would be drastically different; on a much smaller scale,
I want to point out that Eliot's substitution of "history" for
"nature" confirms the fact that the word "history" is to be
understood in "Gerontion" not as a sequence of events in the
"real" past but as an "ideal construction" of those events:
history is not the same thing as nature, the real world outside us. 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.'" 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.
From Modernist
Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot, and the Sense of the Past. Princeton: Princeton UP,
1987.
John Paul Riquelme
Many lines of
"Gerontion,", including the opening ones, are conversational in
character: "Here I am, an old man in a dry month, / Being read to by a
boy, waiting for rain" (CPP 21). 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. The relatively disjointed quality of both "Prufrock"
and "Gerontion," especially the lack of good continuity between the
verse paragraphs, makes it hard to ascribe the language to a speaker, even one
who is in the kind of extreme situation mentally or physically that is
sometimes portrayed in dramatic monologues. Instead of being located, grounded
in a referential way, the language, which is full of dislocations, tends to
float; it refuses to be tied to a limiting scene or to a limited meaning. The
conversational language is not sustained, for instance, in the lines that
follow the opening ones in "Gerontion":
I was neither at the hot
gates
Nor fought in the warm rain
Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,
Bitten by flies, fought.
Nor fought in the warm rain
Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,
Bitten by flies, fought.
(CPP 21)
We find out where this
"I" was not and what it did not do, not where or what it is in any
positive sense. The passage gives rise to questions that it does not answer and
that are not answered elsewhere in "Gerontion." Stylistically, both
the sequence of negatives and the repetition of "fought" at the end
of the sentence indicate the composed, written character of the lines rather
than the spontaneous utterance of an "I" with a personal voice.
The difficulty of
maintaining the illusion of an "I" who speaks becomes greater as
"Gerontion" proceeds, for example, in the fifth stanza with its
sequence of sentences beginning with the verb "Think," which
continues into the next stanza. The sentences may be in the imperative mood. Or
the subject of an indicative verb may have been omitted. The grammatical
indeterminacy disturbs the statements' coherence in ways that resist
resolution. The language pertains not to a character whose name indicates that
he is a person but to one who is named artificially. Like a figure in a
medieval allegory whose name points to a concept that is abstract and general
rather than personal and individual, Gerontion is not a person but one among
many possible incarnations of the meaning of his name in Greek, "little
old man."
From Harmony of
Dissonances: T.S. Eliot, Romanticism, and Imagination. Copyright © 1991 by The
Johns Hopkins University Press.
Jewel Spears Brooker
The psychological
coherence of the first verse paragraph, instrumental in clarifying both the
main structural principle of superimposed contexts and the main image of the
house within the house, is abandoned as Eliot moves to his second stanza. The
tenuous psychological connections that critics have pointed to as transitions
between these two stanzas are inventions, not discoveries. They are
fabrications compelled by a desire for order. The fact is that the second
stanza "follows" the first only in its arrangement on the page;
logically and psychologically, the second does not follow at all. It does not
properly begin, and it does not end; it simply starts, and then, without a
period or even a comma, in the middle of a sentence, in the middle of a line,
it stops.
[. . . .]
This stanza relocates
readers, giving them a far more inclusive vantage point. All of those ruined
houses in windy spaces--from Gerontion's withered brain to Europe 's
war-shattered civilization--are suddenly placed in the context of the rejection
of Christ. Although the second stanza lacks the internal coherence of the
first, it is unified by the fact that all these fragments are related to the
Christian religion and, as will become evident, to a special relation between
knowledge and unbelief. As far as the overall structure of the poem is
concerned, this stanza takes the most teratical image of the previous
stanza--the Jew lying in wait for his prey--and superimposes one of history's
greatest houses, the house of David. 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 .
But these sons of David are not the only tenants of this antique house. Joining
the natural brothers are many half brothers, audacious upstarts who
irreversibly alter Abraham's line. The rejection of Christ by his brothers in
blood led to an expansion of the house of Israel . Anyone of any race
whatsoever who would accept Christ in faith was adopted into what the Bible
calls the new Israel ,
the Christian Church. The tenants in Jacob's greater house include, then,
Christ's adopted brothers and joint heirs, including in this stanza the
seventeenth-century preacher, Lancelot Andrewes. The house of Israel , like
the house of Gerontion, is decayed, dry, wind-sieged.
Eliot's main allusion in
this second verse paragraph is to a sermon preached by Lancelot Andrewes before
King James I on Christmas Day, 1618:
Verbum infans, the Word without a word; the eternal
Word not able to speak a word; a wonder sure and . . .
swaddled; and that a wonder too. He that takes the sea
"and rolls it about the swaddled bands of darkness," to
come thus into clouts, Himself.
Word not able to speak a word; a wonder sure and . . .
swaddled; and that a wonder too. He that takes the sea
"and rolls it about the swaddled bands of darkness," to
come thus into clouts, Himself.
This sermon deals with
the particular theme of Christmas--the Incarnation. The mystery of the
Incarnation, of course, is the mystery of God being immured in a house of
flesh. The ancient image of the body as a house, central in the previous stanza
of this poem, has a special meaning here. 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 Bible frequently describes the body of Christ as a
temple. The book of Hebrews, for example, contains a detailed analogy between
the Jewish house of God, the tabernacle, and the incarnate Christ, "a
greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands" (Hebrews 9: 11).
And Christ referred to his own body in just these terms in a text alluded to by
both Andrewes and Eliot (John 2:18-21). The temple of the Christ, then, is
superimposed upon the Jewish temple which it transformed. The greater temple
was swaddled in darkness, the darkness of infancy's powerlessness, the darkness
of corrupted Judaism, the darkness of history. The body of Christ is a house
apart in "Gerontion"; it also stood in a dry and windy land, but
instead of decaying in the general aridity, it was arrested in full strength
and destroyed. The ruin in all of the houses in in the poem is related to the
destruction of this temple.
The text for Andrewes's
sermon (and for Eliot's poem) is the demand by the Pharisees that Christ give
them proof of his divinity--"We would see a sign!" This text focuses
attention on another house within the house of Israel . The mind of the Pharisees
is this new house, and it is in certain ways analogous to the mind of
Gerontion.
Then certain of the
scribes and of the Pharisees answered, saying, Master, we would see a sign from
thee. But he answered and said unto them, An evil and adulterous generation
seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it, but the sign of
the prophet Jonas. (Matthew 12:38-39)
This passage is crucial
to understand "Gerontion," for it identifies the curse that has
brought all these houses (Greek, Jewish, Christian) to ruin; this curse is a
mentality that isolates intelligence from passion and from belief. Separated
from its context, the above passage seems to say that Christ refused to give
the Pharisees a sign, demanding that they accept him by faith alone. In
context, the passage says almost the opposite. Most of Christ's career was
devoted to giving signs to these professors of law and religion; but whenever a
sign was given, the proud but unperceiving scholars took it for a wonder and,
ironically, resumed their campaign for a sign. In the incident quoted above,
Christ gave two signs of his divinity. First, he restored a paralyzed hand, and
then he cast out a demon which was making its victim blind. The Pharisees
witnessing these signs responded with their usual request, "We would see a
sign!" They accepted the authenticity of the miracles, but they refused to
accept their validity as signs. They would soon see the supreme sign, but their
unbelief, inseparable from their learning, would prevent them from recognizing
it.
This rejection by the
Pharisees, quoted by Andrewes and by Eliot, was a turning point in the life of
Christ and in history, because it led to an expansion of the house of Jacob. In
his immediate response to these Pharisees, Christ oversteps the racial
definition of Israel
by asking "Who is my mother? And who are my brethren?" and by
answering "Whosoever shall do the will of my Father, who is in heaven, the
same is my brother, and sister, and mother" (Matthew 12:48-50). In the
second stanza of "Gerontion," Eliot's use of Andrewes's sermon
superimposes this more inclusive house of Israel , the Christian Church. It
may be supposed that Eliot, who became an admirer of Andrewes's theology, is
contrasting the rejection of Christ by the Jews to the acceptance of Christ by
the Church, or that he is contrasting the Pharisees' blindness to Andrewes's
insight. But Eliot's opening fragment, "Signs are taken for wonders,"
is as applicable to Andrewes as it is to the Pharisees, as applicable to the
Christian Church as to Israel .
In the specific part of the sermon to which Eliot alludes in his poem, Andrewes
repeatedly declares that the Incarnation is a "wonder too," a
"wonder sure." 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. Seduced by paradox, they were
enthralled by the wonder of omnipotence dependent upon a young woman for diaper
changes, of omnipresence locked up in infant flesh. By transforming the
Incarnation into an abstraction, by treating it as an occasion for rhetorical
play, the Church had also taken the sign for a wonder. The Church is another of
this poem's decaying, crumbling houses in dry and windy lands. The Church,
furthermore, is occupied by desiccated and dying tenants housing dull and
shriveled thoughts; the churchyard is parched and, literally as well as
figuratively, packed with dry bones, dry stones, dry excreta.
The third stanza, which
describes a corrupt eucharist ceremony, elaborates and complicates the houses
already introduced in the poem. Attention is focused on the house of the
twentieth-century Church as contemporary participants in the Mass are
superimposed upon the Pharisees and upon the seventeenth-century Church as
accomplices in the ongoing rejection of Christ. The motif of the body as a
house is extended in this stanza. In the Church Age, i.e., after Pentecost, the
bodies of Christians constitute the house of God. "Ye are the temple of
the living god," Paul tells the weak Christians in Corinth (II Corinthians 6:16). Mr. Silvero,
Hakagawa, Madame de Tornquist, and Fraulein von Kulp, then, are decayed
temples, windswept, wind-sieged, wind-abandoned, wind-destroyed.
From Mastery and
Escape: T.S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism. Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1994.
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