On 10/15/2011 8:44 AM, Tom Colket wrote:
> Nancy and Ken,
>
> I do not have a full reading of Gerontion, but maybe I can contribute to
> a discussion.
>
> I've been thinking more about these lines :
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> My house is a decayed house,
> And the Jew squats on the window sill, the owner,
> Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,
> Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.
> -----------------------------------------------------------


I'm pretty far behind the conversation now with what I had intended to
send earlier but with Ken's posting of
 >   Just to highlight a couple of his points about Burbank:Bleistein, the
 >   poem is a poem of masks, with Eliot playing the roles of the two main
 >   characters who are if effect opposite sides of the same (banker's) 
coin.
this is not coming too late.

One of the links I sent in my post about the Jew being a objective
correlative was to a page in in book by Marjorie Perloff.
    Differentials: poetry, poetics, pedagogy
    http://books.google.com/books?id=dX1wu6vA1SMC&pg=PA30
In that section Perloff had spent about two pages discussing Eliot's
being a foreigner in England and not feeling at home in America. She
saw Eliot using the landlord as a symbol of himself. To quote a bit:
    We see the speaker threatened by a "Jew" who, far from being a
    successful grasping landlord, squeezing money out of poor old
    Gerontion, is himself a squatter, a victim of poverty, misery,
    and disease, a figure who in Julius's words, "becomes what he expels"
    Squatting on the window sill, he belongs neither inside the "decayed
    house," nor can he escape its precincts.

As I think about this I can see why TSE didn't put the Jew in a
doorway, too easy to pass through, and why the Jew is *squatting* in
the window, it's an uncomfortable position.

Regards,
    Rick Parker