Christ the tiger

Detail from William Blake’s poem “The Tyger” (1825)

For my class on modern European literature, I asked my students to write a short answer to this question on T. S. Eliot’s poem, “Gerontion” (1920):

The poem associates Christ with the image of the tiger twice. This image diverges from the prevalent one used to describe Christ. For example, when John baptizes Jesus, he says: “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29). Why do you think Eliot uses this divergent image? Is the image used identically in line 20 and line 48? Consider the attributes and actions of the tiger in the poem. In what ways is Christ similar or dissimilar to a tiger?

Here is my own extended answer.

In Robert Frost: A Life, Jay Parini writes:

Frost’s aesthetic was largely derived from the Romantics, especially Coleridge, who argued in the Biographia Literaria that the imagination of the poet “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate.” The enterprise of poetry, from Wordsworth on, was regarded as the work of defamiliarizing the familiar by freshening the vision: hence Pound’s injunction to “make it new.” For Coleridge and Wordsworth both, the chief opponent of making it new was “custom,” and the work of the poet (in Coleridge’s terminology) was to release “wonder” from the “familiar.” In The Prelude, Wordsworth regularly condemns “habit,” “use and custom,” and “the regular action of the world,” asking us to experience the miracle of being in the most commonplace objects (pp. 139-140).

T. S. Eliot uses the divergent image of “Christ the tiger” in order to release wonder from the familiar. The biblical custom is to envision Christ as the Lamb of God (John 1:29) or, less frequently, the Lion of Judah (Revelation 5:5), but never the tiger. A lamb evokes the meek and mild rabbi of the First Advent while a lion evokes the fierce judge of the Second Advent. Although the Lamb of God was sacrificed on the altar of the Cross, death was conquered by the Lion of Judah, as John witnesses in his apocalyptic vision: “And between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders I saw a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain, with seven horns and with seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth” (Revelation 5:6, emphasis mine). John implies that Christ is the lamb and the lion at once, never one or the other but always and forever both. Eliot offers an emphatic “Yes” to William Blake’s question in “The Tyger”: “Did He who made the Lamb make thee?” The lamb represents the vulnerable humanity of Christ, whereas the lion represents his victorious divinity, consistent with the Athanasian Creed:

He is God from the essence of the Father,
begotten before time;
and he is human from the essence of his mother,
born in time;
completely God, completely human,
with a rational soul and human flesh;
equal to the Father as regards divinity,
less than the Father as regards humanity.

Of course, we should note that the lion and tiger belong to the family of wild cats, so Eliot improvises faithfully. The lion is the proverbial “king of the jungle”—a fitting image for the King of the universe. What, then, is achieved by using the image of a tiger? Here is the first use:

Signs are taken for wonders.  ‘We would see a sign!’

The word within a word, unable to speak a word,

Swaddled with darkness.  In the juvescence of the year

Came Christ the tiger

In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas,

To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk

Among whispers; by Mr. Silvero

With caressing hands, at Limoges

Who walked all night in the next room;
By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians;

By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room

Shifting the candles; Fräulein von Kulp

Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door.

      Vacant shuttles

Weave the wind.

Christ the tiger comes in “the juvescence of the year.” The word “juvescence” riffs on “juvenescence,” meaning a youthful state. Since “Gerontion” is a dramatic monologue spoken by a diminutive old man, juvescence refers not only to an earlier chronology in the man’s lifespan but also in history’s timeline. The people of God were waiting for a Messiah with “repining restlessness” (to quote a phrase from George Herbert): “Then some of the scribes and Pharisees answered him, saying, ‘Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you'” (Matthew 12:38). Tragically, they were blind to the sign in front of them. Expecting a lion, they saw a lamb—ignorant that both cohere in the person of Jesus. Eliot describes the Christ Child as “The word within a word, unable to speak a word, / Swaddled with darkness.” This tiger in the manger appears harmless, a cub with no roar and no fangs, adorable for its exotic beauty. The colored variation of stripes produce awe; they may also suggest that “by His stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5).

How did the “evil and adulterous generation” that seeks for a sign respond to this tiger (Matthew 12:39)? He was “to be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk among whispers,” which conjures up the Eucharist feast. What follows in the stanza is not the pious devotion of Christians at the communion table but the perverted devotion of heathens: the sensuality of Mr. Silvero, the aestheticism of Hakagawa, the occult of Madame de Tornquist, and the guilt of Fräulein von Kulp. This is the story of history.

Now, consider the second use of the image:

The tiger springs in the new year.  Us he devours.  Think at last

We have not reached conclusion, when I

Stiffen in a rented house.  Think at last

I have not made this show purposelessly

And it is not by any concitation

Of the backward devils.

I would meet you upon this honestly.

I that was near your heart was removed therefrom

To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.

I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it

Since what is kept must be adulterated?

I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch:

How should I use it for your closer contact?

The verbs predicating the advent of the tiger are significant: in the first advent, he “came” quietly and gently as a newborn cub; in the second advent, he “springs” quietly but lethally as a predatory animal. Where humans throughout history devoured him, he now devours them in the Final Judgment. Not appreciating the “beauty” of the tiger when he stalked the earth kindly, “terror” now abides as Christ executes his perfect “inquisition.” Since the old man did not receive the tiger, the passion of faith eludes him as he searches for “closer contact.”

In conclusion, Eliot’s image of the tiger “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate” Christ as a paradoxical figure of mercy and wrath, beauty and terror. The effect of this image is to hasten our reception of Christ, as the hymn “Come to Jesus!” plainly says: “Come to Jesus! do not tarry, / Enter in at mercy’s gate; / Oh, delay not til the morrow, Lest thy coming be too late.”