In the Depths of Memory:

We can say that “Gerontion” and “Sick Dojchin” are related on several levels of similarity and difference:
1. Both poems are dramatic monologues in which the speaker cannot be easily identified. Although Dojchin is a character from Balkan folklore, he takes on completely different characteristics in this poem and the story about him is practically eliminated. The recontextualization of the character turns him from saviour into a “morbid epic character” (Nanevski, 1977:304). Both Gerontion and Sick Doychin are universal characters that speak about the local and the global, about the universal and the personal, each in his own way. Behind the “I” in both poems there hide many characters from the reservoir of civilizational prototypes (the black, the white). We cannot draw a stable conclusion even for the age of the character-mask in both poems. Although Gerontion says that he is an “old man”, the deconstruction of the textual elements of being read to and being a man with no senses can point to a different reading of the text—it can show the character as yet unborn or very small, which is the opposite in Doychin’s case, whose heavy thoughts do not correspond with his presence in the “womb”. Furthermore, both characters are something of a prophet, an all-seeing being, like “the mind of X” (Europe, England, Macedonia); they are characters that can rise above the “chaos” in which they live, but which, it seems, is also a part of them.
2. The commentaries on their contemporaries, compatriots and the state of civilization allow the reader to draw deliberate parallels. Dojchin’s White-and-Black City where “chaos and stuffiness rule”, as well as drowsy people, bears a similarity to the overall civilizational panorama of Gerontion. Actually, Gerontion’s ruinous civilization would be incomplete without the White-and-Black City mentioned in Dojchin, as it is its inevitable component.
3. The memory of history and of the past and their mixture with the present are elements in both poems, but for whose interpretation we have to rely on external signals, which in this part of the analysis we shall accept. The external element is the context in which these two poems were created, both the social and the personal world of the authors. Namely, if Gerontion is the fruit of a continuous tradition and written historical past, Dojchin is the fruit of a discontinuous tradition and predominantly “psychological” past. This can be the key to the interpretation of the predominance of historical allusions in Gerontion (the battles in the first stanza, the allusion to the Treaty of Versailles), entwined with religion and rituals (Christianity, the rain), and of the predominance of dreams and the psychological condition of Dojchin (the psychological past), which is sometimes entwined with factual history (King Samuil).
4. As to style, these two poems also show similarities. Many critics have commented on the output of both authors as being hermetic, very allusive and difficult to interpret, anti-sentimental and devoid of lyrical patheticism. There predominate dark images and images whose aim is to shock, negative prefixes and the definition of what is though what it is not.
5. Finally, the inertia and the inaction of both characters, as well as their general function. Both characters are in a way “sick”, and that sickness is both psychological and physical—with the first being predominant in Dojchin, whereas the second in Gerontion. Both can be identified with the mythical character of the sick Fisher King from the legend of the Holy Grail—the king who must be ritually sacrificed in order for peace, order and fertility to rule once again in the country. The function of both characters is the one of Derrida’s concept of the pharmakon (cure), pharmakos (sacrificial lamb) and pharmakeus (magician, prisoner). “If we take Gerontion as a ‘sacrificial lamb’, or pharmakos, the function he needs to perform is the purification of the village (the city, the world) of the evil that is bound to come, but still has not (sickness, death, the avenging God)” (Anchevski, 2007:117). The same could be said of Dojchin, that magician and prisoner, whose sacrifice is the cure for the city, but is deadly for him.