T. S. Eliot's “Gerontion” and the Primal Scene

“Gerontion” is indisputably one of Eliot's most difficult poems, and many of its difficulties have a special character. There is, as one critic put it, a “non-existent plot” in this poem, rising from what another called a “narcotic exploitation of a phantom past.” The poem, more plainly, is characterized by repeated intrusions through the surface texture from a seemingly extraneous yet deeper layer of feeling and by feelings the source and meaning of which are obscure. But that obscurity can be dispelled, at least in large measure, if we approach the poem through that “phantom past,” the “non-existent plot” of the primal fantasy or scene. What I am recommending, in effect, is that we search for the relevance of the poem's epigraph not in metaphor, not in Measure For Measure from which it is excerpted, but in its literal sense—as the words of the speaker-author speaking to himself:

The speaker is neither child nor old man, but both. What he offers us can be read as a dream of youth and age and of the effect of youthful trauma, suffered perhaps just before an after dinner sleep, on the anesthesia of old age.

“Gerontion” is, first of all, permeated with the atmosphere and imagery of primal fantasies: darkness and an aura of vagueness; mirrors, labyrinths and a sense of the unknown; peculiar sounds or noises in the dark or night; coughs and whispers, mysterious movements, shapes and objects shifting; the mother's body as a maze or trap (lines 33-42) and the phallus as weapon.

Moreover, and more decisively, many of the events in the poem describe or are consistent with primal scene experiences and fantasies. Here are the most pertinent: