Gerontion, de Thomas Stearns Eliot

Thou hast nor youth nor age
But as it were an after dinner sleep
Dreaming of both.

Here I am, an old man in a dry month,
Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
I was neither at the hot gates
Nor fought in the warm rain
Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,
Bitten by flies, fought.
My house is a decayed house,
And the Jews squats on the window-sill, the owner,
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,
Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.
The goat coughs at night in the field overhead;
Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.
The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea,
Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.
I an old man,
A dull head among windy spaces.


T. S. Eliot, 1920


T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), recebeu o prémio Nobel da Literatura em 1948.
Transcrevi os versos acima de uma selecção tirada dos Collected Poems, editada pela Faber and Faber pela primeira vez em 1940. Esta edição data de 1999.