Diana Manister wrote:
> Dear Jerome,
>  
> This is middle-school sentence diagramming, not a complete 
> consideration of all the syntactical nuances the statement implies.
   But what we need is what it means or does in the context of the poem. 
It is simple present tense.

           

            48 The tiger springs in the new year.  Us he devours.  Think 
at last
            49 We have not reached conclusion, when I
            50 Stiffen in a rented house.

Obviously one thing is means is that death is not the end. A complete 
consideration of all it implies depends on the specific action of the 
poem. And there it is not so much tense, which is pretty apparent, but 
context.

Ken