This sonnet condenses the Christian teaching about the redemption in Christ’s death on the Cross into a single image of a tenant seeking a new lease from his lord. He journeys to heaven, then to the wealthy on earth, but it is among the sinners that he finds his lord dying, and receives his new lease.
It appeals to all of us who “need a new lease on life.”
The image of the tenant is a curious kind of variation of a notable story of Jesus’s, the Parable of the Wicked Tenants (as in Lk 20:9-19). In the parable, the lord leases his land to tenants, but when he sends messengers to them to take in his share of the produce, they refuse them and kill them (even when he sends his son). In the poem, by contrast, it is the tenant who recognizes his own fruitlessness, and seeks out his lord.