Gerontion - The Poem

The Poem

"Gerontion" opens with an epigraph (from Shakespeare's play Measure for Measure) which states:

Thou hast nor youth nor age

But as it were an after dinner sleep

Dreaming of both.

The poem itself is a dramatic monologue by an elderly character that critics believe to be an older version of J. Alfred Prufrock. The use of pronouns such as "us" and "I" regarding the speaker and a member of the opposite sex as well as the general discourse in lines 53-58, in the opinion of Anthony David Moody, presents the same sexual themes that face Prufrock, only this time they meet with the body of an older man. The poem contains six stanzas of free verse describing the relationship between the narrator and the world around him, ending with a couplet that declares,

Tenants of the house

Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season."

which describes the monologue as the production of the "dry brain," of the narrator in the "dry season" of his age. Hugh Kenner suggests that these "tenants" are the voices of The Waste Land and that Eliot is describing the method of the poem's narrative by saying that the speaker uses several different voices to express the impressions of Gerontion. Kenner also suggests that the poem resembles a portion of a Jacobean play as it relates its story in fragmented form and lack of a formal plot.