Cycles in Gerontion

This poem seems to be a memory, similar to Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom! The poem begins with "Here I am, an old man in a dry month / Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain".  The poem continues with numerous allusions to World War I and Europe, suggesting that the elderly (gerontic) man is reliving his memories of the war and experiences afterward.  However, differing from Absalom! Absalom!, the old man says that he "has no ghosts," a major change between the prevalence of ghosts and their interconnectedness with memory in AA.
The elderly narrator seems to view his life in its "dry" stages, and his tone is weary from all the memories he holds.  He says that he has "lost his passion" and his "sight, smell, taste and touch," suggesting that with age all memories dim and fade from their once ripeness and potency.  This poem speaks to the changes that accompany age, the monotony that settles in and the only thing left is to remember, but even that seems to lose its brightness after remembering the same things for so long.
This poem also contains biblical allusions, mentioned at the end of the second stanza as "Christ the tiger," who came in "depraved May".  This may speak to a lack of faith, that religion is part of the cause of the war-torn Europe he is remembering.
The narrator also uses many primal emotions throughout his monologue.  He uses the line "to be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk" and "the giving famishes the craving" to describe his memories and emotions toward those remembrances.  This suggests that with age, although memories may dull in their potency and become less passionate by modern standards, perhaps they revert to a more base, primal form in which life is a cycle, beginning primally, becoming sophisticated, and returning to the original primal nature toward the end of life.