«Геронтион» Т.С. Элиота: Старик и Европа после войны.

Poem by T S Eliot
the Homeland episode

"Gerontion" is a poem by T. S. Eliot that was first published in 1920 in Ara Vos Prec (his volume of collected poems published in London) and Poems (an almost identical collection published simultaneously in New York). The title is Greek for "little old man," and the poem is an interior monologue relating the opinions and impressions of an elderly man, which describes Europe after World War I through the eyes of a man who has lived most of his life in the 19th century. Two years after it was published, Eliot considered including the poem as a preface to The Waste Land, but was talked out of this by Ezra Pound.

Many of the themes within "Gerontion" are present throughout Eliot's later works, especially within The Waste Land. This is especially true of the internal struggle within the poem and the narrator's "waiting for rain". Time is also altered by allowing past and present to be superimposed, and a series of places and characters connected to various cultures are introduced.

The phrase "wilderness of mirrors" from the poem has been alluded to by many other writers and artists. It has been used as the titles of plays by Van Badham and Charles Evered, of novels by Max Frisch, and of albums by bands such as Waysted. Rock singer Fish entitled his first solo album Vigil in a Wilderness of Mirrors. Some commentators believe that James Jesus Angleton took the phrase from this poem when he described the confusion and strange loops of espionage and counter intelligence, such as the Double Cross System, as a "wilderness of mirrors". It thence entered and has since become commonplace in the vocabulary of writers of spy novels or of popular historical writing about espionage. It was the title of an episode of the television series JAG where the protagonist is subjected to disinformation. Another prominent line in the poem, "In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas/To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk", is the origin of the title of Katherine Anne Porter's first collection of short stories, Flowering Judas and Other Stories (1930).

Eliot scholar Grover Smith said of this poem, "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." Bernard Bergonzi writes that "Eliot's most considerable poem of the period between 1915 and 1919 is 'Gerontion'". Kirk believes that "To me, the blank verse of 'Gerontion' is Eliot's most moving poetry, but he never tried this virile mode later." has cited "Gerontion" as an example of a poem by Eliot that contains anti Semitic sentiments. In the voice of the poem's elderly narrator, the poem contains the line, "And the Jew squats on the window sill, the owner [of my building] / Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp."