too oppressive. But Eliot, a master of vocal registers, now suddenly shifts
tone:
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 tigerThe shift to the cry of the unbelieving Pharisees (who are, of course, Jews),
calling upon Christ to prove his divinity by performing a sign (Matthew
12:38), modulates, in turn, into the words of Lancelot Andrewes’s Christmas
sermon, adapting the Gospel of St. John (“The word without a word; the
eternal Word not able to speak a word”), a phrase that is given an Eliotic twist
in the substitution of “within” for “without” to refer to the dif¤culty of re-
ceiving the Logos. The springtime ritual looks ahead to “April is the cruelest
month”: “juvescence” is not, I think, an incorrect version of “juvenescence,”
as is often suggested, but a neologism, based on its opposite—“senescence.”
The tiger is of course Blake’s tiger, but John Crowe Ransom, in one of the
¤rst and most detailed explications of “Gerontion,” is right to note that “the
lamb who came to be devoured turns into the tiger when Gerontion has for-
gotten the lamb.”^26
But beyond its allusive texture, this is a highly complex passage. Take the
opening alexandrine:
/ / / || / / /
Signs are taken for wonders. “We would see a sign!”The ¤rst sentence, with its trochaic/dactylic rhy thm, is a summarizing com-
mentary, no doubt spoken by the poet whose voice now merges wholly with
Gerontion’s, whereas the second sentence, a direct citation from Matthew, is
iambic. Eliot’s Imagist contemporaries would no doubt have given each sen-
tence its own line:
Signs are taken for wonders.
“We would see a sign!”In joining both sentences in one line, Eliot obscures the distinction be-
tween commentary and citation, the voice of the narrator and the voice
of the Pharisee addressing Christ. And this is obviously intentional: for the
32 Chapter 2