Poem of the week – The Journey of the Magi by TS Eliot
TS Eliot still casts a considerable shadow over modern literature. His ability to express the dissatisfaction and angst of an entire epoch, while making use of new poetic forms and paying due homage to numerous traditions, distinguishes him from his contemporaries.
Poems like The Wasteland, The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, The Hollow Men and The Four Quartets elevated Eliot’s reputation to that of a cultural oracle, gaining him a hoard of literary awards including the coveted Nobel Prize. In 1927, he published our poem of the week, The Journey of the Magi. It was the first of five short poems published annually by Eliot, known together as the Ariel Poems.
The Journey of the Magi is the narrative of the three wise men travelling to Palestine to meet their messiah. It is written in the voice of one of the three and speaks of the terrible tribulations and occasional respites the fabled triad experienced on their way to honour the son of God. An unsettling realisation looms over the conclusion of the poem. The advent of this divine child signalled the end of their era. Paganism would be supplanted by the faith this boy was destined to inspire and the wise men were wise enough to see it.
Gladdened by the auguries of this supernatural occasion, the speaker consequently feels a powerlessness to prevent the coming conclusion of his time. The last line is spent expressing a sentiment many, if not most, readers will find particularly relevant this year –a feeling of incapability and alienation invoking an eagerness for a monumental end. Though not a Christmas poem in the traditional sense, the below displays many of the hallmarks of Eliot’s wider oeuvre, such as bathos, dissonance, discomfort, bewilderment, faith and drama. We hope you enjoy the last poem of the week this year and that you all have a very merry Christmas.
The Journey of the Magi
A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’
And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
and running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arriving at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you might say) satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.