<Dd> Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season . </Dd> <P> which describes the monologue as the production of the "dry brain" of the narrator in the "dry season" of his age . Hugh Kenner suggests that these "tenants" are the voices of The Waste Land and that Eliot is describing the method of the poem's narrative by saying that the speaker uses several different voices to express the impressions of Gerontion . Kenner also suggests that the poem resembles a portion of a Jacobean play as it relates its story in fragmented form and lack of a formal plot . </P> <P> Many of the themes within "Gerontion" are present throughout Eliot's later works, especially within The Waste Land . This is especially true of the internal struggle within the poem and the narrator's "waiting for rain". Time is also altered by allowing past and present to be superimposed, and a series of places and characters connected to various cultures are introduced . </P> <P> To Donald J. Childs, the poem attempts to present the theme of Christianity from the viewpoint of the modernist individual with various references to the Incarnation and salvation . Childs believes that the poem moves from Christmas Day in line 19: "in the Juvescence of the year," to the Crucifixion in line 21 as it speaks of "depraved May" and "flowering Judas". He argues that Gerontion contemplates the "paradoxical recovery of freedom through slavery and grace through sin". In line 20, the narrator refers to Jesus as "Christ the tiger", which emphasizes judgment rather than compassion, according to Jewel Spears Brooker in Mystery and Escape: T.S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism . </P>

What does the narrator say he is waiting for in the first lines of gerontion