ABSTRACT
Gerontion's impotence and distance from a vision of salvation can be compared to that of Eliot's early character Prufrock, but Gerontion takes on larger, more historical, and also more specifically religious connotations than does Prufrock. Gerontion's house, for example, can be read simultaneously as his home, his decrepit body, and also the house of a decrepit civilization itself:
My house is a decayed house, And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner, Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp
The blatant anti-Semitism of these lines-the stereotypical image of the Jew is used here to symbolize a depraved, money-driven society-has been the subject, along with Eliot's anti-Semitic remarks elsewhere, of recent criticism. Within the poem, the image of the Jew is used in the context of its theme of failed Christian revelation.
