The Aristotelian Mr. Eliot: Structure and Strategy in the Waste Land (T. S. Eliot) (Critical Essay‪)‬

Agnostic though he was at the time, T.S. Eliot undoubtedly was searching for some degree of spiritual direction in his Waste Land Cycle of poems. His thoughts might well have been incarnated in Gerontion's words: The pronoun "this" in the final line is strategically ambiguous. Does it refer to his earlier deliberation on the vacuity of human history and the soul-robbing lack of passion in the modern age? Or, more likely, does it refer to the immediate subject of the stanza in which it appears--the spring (appearance or leap) of the tiger in the new year (spring)?