Gerontion (poem) Summary

Gerontion by T. S. Eliot

 

Gerontion is a dramatic monologue-like poem.The poem relates what it is in an elder man's mind. He describes Europe after World War I. This man has lived a lot of experiences, he has lived the majority of his life in the 19th century. He talks and discusses about several general topics, such as religion and sexuality. The narrator refers to Jesus as "Christ the tiger", which emphasizes judgment rather than compassion. The narrator discusses sexuality throughout the text, spending several lines:

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?

Thomas Stearns ''T.S.'' Eliot

 

  T.S. Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1888. He published his first poetic masterpiece, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," in 1915. In 1921, he wrote the poem "The Waste Land" while recovering from exhaustion. The dense, allusion-heavy poem went on to redefine the genre and become one of the most talked about poems in literary history. For his lifetime of poetic innovation, Eliot won the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Part of the ex-pat community of the 1920s, he spent most of his life in Europe, dying in London, England, in 1965.