Gerontion

First, I just want to say this poem for the most part was super confusing.  I feel like Eliot dropped a lot of names of people that we as readers are unfamiliar with, as well as lots of names of places.  I think the poem is very complex.  It was quite and interesting poem although hard to understand.  That being said there was one thing that I wanted to talk about, and it is about how at the end we kind of see that the "old man" in the poem is going to continue his work no matter his age.  This tells me that if we assume the narrator to be Eliot (we know him not to be an old man when he wrote it), then he believes that his work is never over.  I really like the line "What will the spider do suspend its operations, will the weevil delay?", because it really shows that he is dedicated to his work, just as a spider is to spinning its web.  These are actions that he portrays as ones that are never-ending.  This makes me feel like he thinks that poetry is never-ending, as well as that it is not always straight forward and uncomplicated.  There are a lot of intricacies in a spiders web, and I think that is something that we see in this poem.  It is very intricate, even the different types of meter employed throughout the poem show that Eliot developed it with careful thought and deliberation and that everything included was deliberate and serves a purpose (even though I cannot speak to exactly what that is!).  I am hoping that through discussion of this poem tomorrow I will have a better grasp of Eliot's intent with the poem, because I have read it several times now and much of it is still confusing for me.