In characters, images and, finally, personal confession, old age suffuses this period of significant dramatic, critical and poetic works. The Family Reunion contains Eliot’s most realised elderly female characters, their age a personification of the passage of time, as the play considers the futility of attempting to control that passage. Old Possum presents elderly characters who, having lived full lives, now evince contentment and pride in their dotage. Finally in Four Quartets, Eliot identifies, in a manner sometimes critical, sometimes self-accusatory, a litany of failings and ‘wrongs’ in old men.