Ma a differenza di
Gerontion io non ho ancora perso la mia
Eliot,
Gerontion, 1920, available at <http://www.bartleby.com/l99/13.html>.
Perhaps the uncertainty regarding the identity behind each female figure may spring from the ambivalence of the poet's and speaker's attitude, confusing sensual and divine love in their mysticism, similar to the themes and attitudes explored in
Gerontion and other poems (Childs, 1997: 84), and influenced by Dante (Ellis 1983:211).
In "
Gerontion," however, Saul goes so far as to trap Senator Lockhart In a conference room--blacking out the windows--to allow Iranian deputy intelligence chief Majid Javadi to escape the country.
Gerontion (1920) is the first of the poems I have chosen to mis-read, so to say.
Eliot employed as a metaphor in "
Gerontion" for the immense confusion of post--World War I civilization and consciousness alike.
Eliot's
Gerontion and Journey of the Magi." Bloom's Modern Critical Views: T.
Gish--whose fascinating analysis of
Gerontion as the poet's doppelganger is only distantly related to Dante--parallels Pierre Janet's "extremes of dissociation", so often objectified in Modernist literature, with Eliot's "dissociation of sensibility" (31-32).
Eliot gave the characters in "
Gerontion" (1920) peculiar foreign names: Mr.
Even then, that was itself a cultural indictment already tested in the presence of the Christ the tiger in
Gerontion, published in 1921, and through, in 1922, the resurrected Christ wandering the deserts of The Waste Land, just before the thunder brings its healing rain; it may even be found in the eponymous hippopotamus of the quatrains fame ascending to Heaven ahead of the guardians of the True Church.
Eliot's "
Gerontion"), make it easy enough to read all the novels as parables of "dangerous knowledge," a favorite theme of sf writers since Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and one that goes all the way back to the Forbidden Tree in the Book of Genesis.