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which I've given you a piece of on your handout,
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so let's look at that for a second,
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Eliot's 1920 poem, gerontion.
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I'm just going to read a little bit of this
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so that you have the flavor of the thing that Nabokov is burlesquing:
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Here I am, an old man in a dry month,
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Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
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I was neither at the hot gates
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Nor fought in the warm rain
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Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,
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Bitten by flies, fought.
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My house is a decayed house.