[3] Along with "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and The Waste Land, and other works published by Eliot in the early part of his career, '"Gerontion" discusses themes of religion, sexuality, and other general topics of modernist poetry.
During that time, Eliot was working at Lloyds Bank and editing The Egoist, devoting most of his literary energy to writing review articles for periodicals.
The use of pronouns such as "us" and "I" regarding the speaker and a member of the opposite sex as well as the general discourse in lines 53–58, in the opinion of Anthony David Moody, presents the same sexual themes that face Prufrock, only this time they meet with the body of an older man.
[7][8] The poem is a monologue in free verse describing his household (a boy reading to him, a woman tending to the kitchen, and the Jewish landlord), and mentioning four others (three with European names and one Japanese) who seem to inhabit the same boarding house.
[10] Kenner also suggests that the poem resembles a portion of a Jacobean play as it relates its story in fragmented form and lack of a formal plot.
[4] In line 20, the narrator refers to Jesus as "Christ the tiger", which emphasizes judgment rather than compassion, according to Jewel Spears Brooker in Mystery and Escape: T. S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism.
Sharpe suggests that Christ appears to Gerontion as a scourge because he understands that he must reject the "dead world" to obtain the salvation offered by Christianity.
[14] However, other critics disagree; Russell Kirk believes that the poem is "a description of life devoid of faith, drearily parched, it is cautionary".
The "closer contact" sought by the narrator represents both the physical longing of intimacy as well as the emotional connection he previously had with the female described in the poem.
[23] To Sharpe, the inability of the narrator to carry out his sexual desires leads him to "humiliated arrogance" and the "apprehension of Judgement without the knowledge of God's mercy.
Gerontion has lost the ability to partake in the same sexual endeavours that face Nathaniel Hawthorne's hero in "Young Goodman Brown", yet Montgomery believes he has "turned from innocent hope to pursue significance in the dark forces of the blood".
Some commentators believe that James Jesus Angleton took the phrase from this poem when he described the confusion and strange loops of espionage and counter-intelligence, such as the Double-Cross System, as a "wilderness of mirrors".
"[28] In terms of poetic structure, Eliot was influenced by Jacobean dramatists such as Thomas Middleton that relied on blank verse in their dramatic monologues.