Three Poems on Age - sample

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Three Poems on Age

By T. S. Eliot

Narrated by Gregory Sheridan

1) The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
2) Portrait of a Lady
3) Gerontion

The first two poems in this collection were published in 1917 and the third in 1920. These poems are Eliot's most large scale poetic productions before the composition of The Wasteland, which appeared in 1922.

Despite Eliot's comparative youth at the time (he was in his early thirties) each poem brilliantly captures different aspect of the profound effect of aging process on human aspiration. Prufrock is a bashful fellow, living a most unremarkable life, and yet tormented by an awareness of the vacuous triviality of his existence. The Portait of a Lady exposes the inherent banality of most social gatherings, where nothing noteworthy can be expected to happen. The narrator of Gerontion describes himself as 'an old man, A dull head among windy spaces," who is a tenant of "a decayed house." He is a truly etiolated soul, who has lost even Prufrock's tenuous belief in the possibility of ambition.