Geriatric Consciousness as an Anchor in the Poetry
of T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats
Dr. Vinamrata,
Assistant Professor,
University Department of English,
B. R. Ambedkar Bihar University,
Muzaffarpur,
Bihar, India.
Abstract:
“An
aged man is but a paltry thing,
A
tattered coat upon a stick . . .” (Yeats ll. 9–10)
These lines from W.B. Yeats’s “Sailing to
Byzantium” talk about the plight of an old man reduced to the analogy of “a
tattered coat upon a stick”(Yeats ll. 9–10). He is nothing more than a mere
scarecrow. The modern civilisation can boast of its remarkable achievement of
delaying the process of ageing. Mortality rate decreasing, anti-ageing and
anti-wrinkles cream at vogue and enhancement of medical facilities have no
doubt given ample opportunity to the world to survive and have a better life.
In a materialistic world, this is no longer luxury but necessity, and this fact
can neither be denied nor debated. The question arises that, in spite of all
these medical enhancements, the fact that remains inevitable is death and
before death, as much as we tend to avoid it, comes old age. Old age for long
has been the topic for many writers like Simone De Beauvoir, Hardy, Larkin,
Yeats, Eliot and many more. Still, it is a very little-talked-about aspect in
literary studies and is more often seen as a medical term related to medicine
and medical practitioners. Here in this research article, the idea is to
explore the geriatric consciousness explored in the poems of W.B. Yeats and
T.S. Eliot and try to establish the fact that geriatric consciousness has long
been the essence of literary studies, and ageing is not something just to abhor
and be afraid of, but to embrace and rejoice. The paper tends to argue for
resilience and embrace senescence as spiritual enquiry and wisdom, and not a
temporal burden.
Keywords: Modern Poetry, Gerontology, Geriatric Studies,
T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Senescence, Spirituality
Introduction:
“Buddha recognised his own fate in the person of a very
old man, because, being to save humanity, he chose to take upon himself the
entirety of the human state.” (Beauvoir 7)
Simone
de Beauvoir in her book The Coming of Age, talks about the general
tendency of people to disregard old age. Old age is seen as a burden, and the
attitude is to “evade old age” (7). She simply starts with Siddhartha’s story
and his transformation into Buddha. Prince Siddhartha had his four encounters,
which we refer to as the “Four Sights of Buddha”: an old man, a sick man, a
corpse and a peaceful ascetic. He was left contemplating, the existence and the
meaning of human life. It was this that moved him to turn into an ascetic,
renounce his princely pleasures and find the true meaning of humanity. The aged
man and his deteriorated condition is the significant moment for Siddhartha to
imbibe all the stages of human life openheartedly. Once we choose to dwell upon
the entirety of the human state, we understand the true meaning of life, and
this is the highest form of spiritual awakening. The old man is a repeated
metaphor in the poems of W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot, where they tend to find
meaning in the chaotic modern contemporary world. The early twentieth century
saw mere chronological progression and was marked by spiritual fragmentation.
In order to find a sense of the society where ruptures were turning into
reality, poets like Yeats and Eliot saw old age as the perfect metaphor. For
Eliot, the spiritual essence of old age is seen in the prophetic attitude of
the aged Tiresias or the ‘dry brain’ (Eliot VIII.2) of Gerontion. Whereas for
Yeats, the perfect ‘paltry thing’ (Yeats ll. 9), reduced to a scarecrow, tries
to escape to a world where his intellect will be forever heard in engravings
and historical details. Thus, this paper
tries to explore the relevance of gerontology not just limited to biological
process, but as a condition of cultural awakening and an argument for geriatric
consciousness. While the modern writers were engrossed in the new, Yeats and
Eliot dwelled upon the labyrinth of old age, they focused on the tensions
between the decaying empty vessel and spiritual and intellectual vitality.
Review
of Literature:
Simone
de Beauvoir, in her book, The Coming of Age (1970), paved the path for
geriatric consciousness not to be just limited to medicine and biology and the
focus of biological research and clinical practices. She brings it into the
consciousness of literary studies, focusing on feministic aspects as well as
gerontology to be the cornerstone of embracing the full human form or the span
of human life. She tries to argue for the assimilation of old age into the
consciousness of the people in order to understand their purpose and being. She
talks about people being ambivalent towards old age and old people living a
wretched and desolate life. She problematizes the concept of old age, stating
that we celebrate adolescence and demarcate it as a crucial aspect of human
growth, but we tend to ignore the stepping into old age; instead, we wait for
death. As if death is more acceptable than ageing.
“Age is removed from us by an extent of time
so great that it merges with eternity: such a remote future seems unreal. Then
again the dead are nothing. . . . – it raises no problems. ‘I shall no longer
exist.’ (12)
Another
important writer who has incorporated the essence of the literary aspect of old
age is Margaret Morganroth Gullette. Gullette, in her work Aged by Culture (2004),
argues that old age is not just the weight of the burden of years, but is also
the burden of the cultural consciousness of people, which is deteriorating and
forgetting the elderly from its cultural narratives. This burden of years is
seen of the crumbling identity of the aged. She argues that the whole cycle of
life should be emphasised, and the burden of the whole cycle of life should not
just fall on old age. Critics like Anne M. and Wyatt-Brown also highlight that
literary representations of old age have historically oscillated between the
polarities of "venerable wisdom" and "grotesque
decrepitude." They also argue that
it is generally the English-speaking world that has made a little bit effort
and geriatric studies as a focus of their interest (Wyatt-Brown 1990, 310).
Although one must contemplate and assimilate the fact that geriatric
consciousness may be a term fashioned by the English-speaking world, but has
always been in the roots of Indian consciousness and civilisation.
abhivādanaśīlasyanityaṃvṛddhopasevinaḥ|
catvāritasyavardhantaāyuḥprajñāyaśobalam||
(Manusmiriti2.121)
The Sanskrit shloka,
which means that the person who honours elders gains in fourfold aspect,
earning long life, wisdom, fame, and strength. Although this paper claims not
to indulge in the establishment of geriatric studies as an area whose emergence
is to be traced, it instead focuses on the aspect of it being a long-neglected
concept to be incorporated in mainstream literary studies. In the same vein comes
in the crucial work of Kathleen Woodward. Her pioneering work, Ageing and
Its Discontents(1991),discusses the fear of old age with a psychological
perspective. In one of the chapters titled "Mirror Stage of Old Age,"
the protagonist Marcel, taken from Proust’s The Past Recaptured, when he
returns to Paris after a few years, he observes the people who were once
reputed, handsome and of celebrity status to be reduced to elderly caricatures.
Marcel holds a distance and initially is disgusted by old age, and later
realises he is nearing the same phase. He witnesses what we call as the mirror
stage of psychoanalysis.
“ Marcel
sentimentalizes the old man’s physical infirmities, musing for example, that he
preferred to see in his limited gestures “an almost physical gentleness, a sort
of detachment from the realities of life” (183 quoted by Kathleen Woodward from
Proust). Later Marcel will find himself repelled by old age-because he is
dangerously close to it-and will resort to satire. (Woodward 55)”
Thomas R. Cole,
in his work The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Ageing in America (1992),
suggested that the modern approach towards old age is to inculcate and brew a
sense of mythical understanding of the materialist monotonous world. Whereas Stephen
Katz, in his Disciplining Old Age: The Formation of Gerontological Knowledge
(1996), perceives gerontology as a constant struggle between the internal
old age gaze and the subject’s desire for transcendence and spirituality. The
poetry of Yeats and Eliot has all the ingredients of a deeper delving into the
understanding of geriatric consciousness as foregrounded by the above-mentioned
critics. Yeats’ ‘gyre’ can be seen as the cyclic nature of human life, or his
“Sailing to Byzantium”, portrays the tension of a disintegrating world and
mortal life where the paltry old man realises his intellectual capacity, which
he wants to disseminate to the world. Eliot’s old man in “Gerontion” (1920) is
another example of a fragmented, disillusioned world, burdened by the aftermath
of the wars and trying to find solace in a fragmented society. “Here I am, an
old man in a dry month / Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain” (Eliot, l.
1-2). This man is waiting for rain in a dry month, which very aptly showcases
the situation of the contemporary world. Tiresias, the blind prophet from The
Waste Land, is another metaphor for geriatric consciousness. He has lived
the life of both man and woman, and he has been there seeing all for eternity,
which is the symbol of human flaws and losing sympathy for the aged. Thus,
Yeats and Eliot can be seen as the representative poets who imbibe the idea of
literary gerontology and pave the path for the pivotal inquiry of human life,
its essence and the permanent aspect of change in the ephemeral nature of life.
Methodology: This research
paper applies a qualitative, exploratory, close reading of the poems of Yeats
and Eliot, focusing on the theme of old age and geriatric studies. The poems of
Yeats, like “Sailing to Byzantium”, “Among School Children” and “The Tower”,
whereas Eliot’s poems like “Gerontion”, The Wasteland and Four
Quartets will serve as the primary sources. The theoretical framework of
gerontology and geriatric consciousness will be applied to a significant study
of the poems.
Hypothesis: The poetry of
Yeats and Eliot both focus on the theme of old age, where old age is not merely
physical decline but a psychological framework of the disintegration of the
consciousness of the contemporary world. The process of ageing is not merely
biological but serves as the essence of spiritual decline and the necessity of
redemption. Yeats embraces old age disintegration to transcend, whereas Eliot
tries to create a fragmented picture of the fragmented world. This paper tries
to study the diverse viewpoints of both poets on the theme of ageing from
different perspectives. Where Yeats employs
poetry as a means to transcend mortality, and Eliot seeks spiritual
reconciliation for the decaying age.
Yeats and the
Aesthetic Reclamation of Old Age:
While
T. S. Eliot’s vision of geriatric consciousness is seen as a paralytic idea of
old age and a civilisation of spiritual drought, whereas W. B. Yeats provides a
more combative and defiant engagement with the ageing. For Yeats, ageing is not
a simple withdrawal of the ‘dry brain’. It is not just a reminiscence of
memory, but a tumultuous struggle between the dying animal of the physical body
and the unyielding vitality of the creative spirit. In the poem “Sailing to
Byzantium”, Yeats directly confronts the cultural marginalisation of the
elderly. Yeats addresses the old man as: “An aged man is but a paltry thing, /
A tattered coat upon a stick” (ll. 9–10). This metaphor of the "tattered
coat" used for the old man is the biological reality of senescence as a
form of physical disintegration. Although this scarecrow image of the elderly
is not just the mere desolate representation of the old age but the old man
tries to ‘sail’ away from the biological world—a country that is "no country
for old men" (I. 1)—towards the symbolic realm of Byzantium, where the
ageing consciousness can be transmuted into the "artifice of
eternity." (III. 24)
From
a cultural gerontological viewpoint, Yeats’s Byzantium represents a radical
resistance to ageist discourses that equate physical frailty with intellectual
or spiritual obsolescence. As Kathleen Woodward observes in her analysis of
Yeats. The later poems of Yeats can be read as the creative representation of
old age, where the diminishing of the body is compensated by the amplification
of the soul. Yeats argues that the soul must "clap its hands and sing, and
louder sing / For every tatter in its mortal dress" (II. 11–12). Here, the
geriatric man is reimagined not as ametaphor of decay but as a catalyst for
artistic transfiguration. The poet’s desire to be gathered into the
"artifice of eternity" (III. 24) is a rejection of what Margaret
Morganroth Gullette calls the "social invisibility" of the aged. By
aspiring to the form of a "golden bird," Yeats asserts that the
geriatric subject can transcend the linear decay of the flesh to achieve a
permanent, mythic status.
This
reclamation of old age is further complicated in his poem “Among School
Children,” where Yeats moves from the desire for transcendence to a profound
meditation on embodiment and memory. Standing among "sixty-year-old
smiling public man" (l. 8), the poet-speaker experiences what Anne M. Wyatt-Brown
identifies as a ‘geriatric epiphany’, a moment where the past and present
collide through the lens of the ageing body. The poet confronts the
"hollow of cheek" and "quattrocento finger" (ll. 25–26),
juxtaposing his current physical state with the idealised images of youth. Yeats's
use of memory as a metaphor to interrogate the continuity of the self raises
the question of whether old age is just a burden or a complete vision of life.
The process of ageing cannot be differentiated from life. It is an integral
part of life itself. The poem’s concluding rhetorical question—“How can we know
the dancer from the dance?” (I. 64) can be seen as a pivotal moment in
modernist geriatric representation. It suggests an integrated vision where
body, memory, and art converge into a singular, dynamic movement. For Yeats,
the dance represents the whole of life. The essence of life, the experiences,
and the skills one learns while living. It incorporates both the bloom of youth
and the decay of the old. This perspective aligns with Thomas R. Cole’s
assertion that the life cycle should be viewed as a moral and aesthetic unity
rather than a series of disconnected stages. Thus, the "dancer" (the
biological subject) cannot be separated from the "dance" (the lived experience
and creative legacy). Yeats questions the binary vision of wisdom versus decay.
He suggests that the experience of the elderly is the very fabric of the
performance, providing the weight and history necessary for the soul’s final,
magnificent "singing."
The
later poems of Yeats represent a assimilating and reclaiming approach towards
old age. Although he acknowledges the problematic physical challenges of old
age, in poems like The Tower reclaims the power of spiritual awakening.
Yeats’s geriatric figures are in a state of perpetual motion, transforming
their "sensual music" into "monuments of unageing
intellect" (I. 8). Through this lens, Yeats does not merely survive old
age; he performs it, turning the biological decline into a high-modernist
spectacle of resilience and transcendence. This makes him a central figure in
cultural gerontology’s effort to redefine the aged subject as a potent agent of
cultural and artistic change.
Eliot’s Gerontological
Approach:
T. S. Eliot’s “Gerontion”,
as the name typically suggests, is a poem that opens with the waiting of a
geriatric man for rain. He deliberately informs the reader of his old age, and
the fact that he is being read by a boy seems to fit the idea of old age wisdom
to be neglected by the world and the young generation, trying to read to the
elderly. The fact that the old man has been ‘waiting for rain’ also signifies
his eternal wait for spiritual showers in the dying age, signified by ‘dry
month’(I. 1-2). Gerontion is symbolic of a figure whose existence is defined by
a "dull head among windy spaces" (I. 16). His dull head has gathered
a lot of information to be passed on, but the people around are phoney enough
to listen. His mind is cluttered with the debris of the past. He talks about
the reminiscence of war and the decay and dismal life that is left. The only
thing that can now redeem them is the sign of a ‘second coming’. He reminds us
instantly of Yeats and the Christ coming as a tiger. The fragmented world can
only be redeemed by spiritual reconciliation, and if not so, then the final
annihilation.
“Signs are taken
for wonders. ‘We would see a sign!’
The word within a
word, unable to speak a word,
Swaddled with
darkness. In the juvenescence of the
year
Came Christ the
tiger” (2. 17-20)
The coming of
Christ can be seen as the final redemption. The old man has seen life, he knows
history is never concrete and authentic and is confusing, comprising of "cunning
passages, contrived corridors" (l. 35). The geriatric old man is trapped
between the history and future, a past which cannot be changed and a lost
passion which his physical inability keeps him from changing the course of the
future. “Gerontion” is a moral recalling of spiritual consciousness, which can
be reclaimed if the present generation learns from the geriatric man. The old
man has lost all his senses, which is a metaphor for the dying generation
deprived of human essence. To feel again, Eliot proposes to use drugs and
excite his senses to bring back the essence of being called a human. The
historical burden of the wars, as well as the materialistic approach to life,
drives the old man to sleep in a corner, feeling tired and dejected. The spider
metaphor elaborates the trap of the materialistic world, where people are
baited and trapped in the web of lies and dilemmas. Here Eliot forces the
reader to contemplate between the fragility of the flesh and time. Exhausted
and drained, the old man waits for rain, spiritual rejuvenation, but instead,
the dryness continues.
The Wasteland can be seen as
an extension of this image. In The Wasteland, the idea of ageing is not
limited to a single protagonist but an entire generation that is deteriorating.
Here, the rain is again anticipated, and memory yet again called upon. The old
prophet Tiresias becomes the mouthpiece of the decaying generation, whose
longevity has seen all yet without eyes. Tiresias can be seen as the symbol of
the repetitive nature of the world, just like Sisyphus. The month of April
brings no joy but stirs up the emotion of cruelty. Materialistic prosperity can
never bring joy and just fulfils the desire.
“April is the
cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of
the dead land, mixing
Memory and
desire, stirring
Dull roots with
spring rain.” (The Wasteland 1. 1-4)
The
Image of the Fisher King again reclaims a sterile king and barren land, which
mirrors the cultural decay of the civilisation. The cultural sterility is
caused by the generation’s depletion of values, and the multiple voices and
narratives in the poem create a cacophony of voices. It is a generation where ‘Hieronymo’s
mad againe’ (V. 113). These symbolic voices carry the burden of history and memory,
which have forced them to age. The final reclaiming of the past and the
assimilation of the present can only be achieved by spiritual reconciliation.
“Datta.
Dayadhvam. Damyata
Shantihshantihshantih”
(V. 114-115).
These
geriatric metaphors of Eliot encapsulate the modernist struggle. The effort to
find a singular, redemptive meaning within the overwhelming debris of the
years. Eliot thus portrays civilizational senescence not as a period of
dignified completion but as a crisis of cultural identity that requires a
radical, perhaps impossible, spiritual rebirth.
Conclusion:
Thus, the poetic vein of Yeats
and Eliot establishes them as the forerunners in the field of cultural
gerontology. They not only focus on the burden of years, physical
inabilities and social alienation of the elderly but also make it a point that
the geriatric man becomes the metaphor for the cultural representation of a civilisation.
Through the memories, reclaiming of the past and spiritual enquiry, these old
subjects become the mouthpiece for saving the world from cultural depletionand
pave the path towards spiritual awakening and resilience. These are in
real ways understanding “The Pleasures of No Longer being very Young” and the
meaning of rejoicing in “unfathomable wisdom like Nestor” (Chesterton 43). The
poetry of Yeats and Eliot laid the groundwork for a literary gerontology that
continues to resonate today. They
together remind us that the experience of ageing remains a fundamental inquiry of
what it means to be human in the face of relentless temporal change.
Works
Cited
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