“Us He Devours”: Christianity and Its Use of Human Fear in T. S. Eliot’s “Gerontion”1

Abstract

Both incarnations of the tiger in T. S. Eliot’s “Gerontion” unequivocally refer to Jesus Christ as opposed to his biblical image of a lamb.2 Victor Strandberg argues that the appearance of Christ as “the tiger” suggests a “sense of self-judgment, this sense of inadequacy, a sense of spiritual failure on Gerontion’s part and we could surmise on T. S. Eliot’s part” as well.3 However, while writing his poem within seven years of his conversion into AngloCatholicism, Eliot hardly seems to adopt the perspective of an erring non-believer. I would argue that the tiger is a deliberate reversal of the traditional idea of Christ as a lamb, which foregrounds the idea of spiritual division rather than unity in the poem and implies that it is fear rather than love that ensures one’s belief. We may note that “Christ the tiger” which “Came” “In the juvescence of the year” is “To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk.”4 With a possible reference to the Trinitarian nature of God, these last three words suggest a division of the evoked celebration of the Holy Eucharist, where the consecrated elements, bread (“eaten”) and wine (“drunk”), are clearly separated by the centered, unfamiliar element (“divided”), at the same time implying God’s own lack of unity. While communicants are conventionally to enjoy the unity with Christ, the Saviour’s body and blood in Eliot’s poem is thus not shared, but “divided” among conspiracy-like “whispers” and automaton-like gestures of various disconnected figures who participate in this “ghostly parody of the sacrament” without belief, reflecting the fragmentation of their own God.5 The “divided” image of the Eucharist is juxtaposed with a peculiar unity in “Us he devours,” where the order of the pronouns is markedly reversed.6 On the surface, the tiger that “springs in the new year” (l. 48) devours rather than being devoured.7 By “Us” the lyrical “I” may denote only “I an old man” (l. 15) and “you” which appears in Gerontion’s recurring imperative “Think” and “Think at last” (l. 33, 36, 43, 48, 50) and which may be, as David Ward notes, “yet himself ”8 or a woman Gerontion seems to speak to in stanza five.9 The blurring gender of “us” may suggest the meaning of the pronominal https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2046537