Journey of the Magi

“Journey of the Magi” is a free-verse poem by T. S. Eliot, published in 1927 as an illustrated card for Christmas. Belonging to Eliot’s middle period, the poem is a dramatic monologue in which the speaker is one of the three wise men who brought gifts to the infant Jesus in Bethlehem. He describes the journey they took and looks back in old age at the significance of the events surrounding the birth.

Eliot wrote the poem shortly after his conversion to the Anglican faith, and it helped him get over the writer’s block he had been experiencing for more than a year or so. As a poem about Christian faith, it marks a new thematic departure for Eliot, and it may reflect something of his own spiritual journey. For the Magus who narrates the poem, his spiritual rebirth involved pain and suffering because his new faith put him at odds with his own society, in which people continued to worship their pagan gods.

Poet Biography

Poet, dramatist, literary critic, and editor Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on September 26, 1888, in St. Louis, Missouri. His family had roots in New England, and after Eliot graduated from Smith Academy in St. Louis, he attended Milton Academy in Massachusetts. He entered Harvard in 1906, from which he received a bachelor’s degree in 1909 and a master’s degree in English literature the following year. From 1910 to 1911 he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, France, before returning to Harvard. After the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Eliot traveled to England, where he took up a scholarship at Merton College, Oxford, studying philosophy. Eliot taught English at Birkbeck, University of London, and Highgate School, and in 1917 he began working for Lloyd’s Bank, a position he held until 1925. After that he joined the publishing firm Faber and Gwyer. In 1929, when the firm became Faber and Faber, he became a director, a role he continued until his death. As editor at Faber, he was responsible for launching or advancing the careers of many young poets.

Eliot’s Modernist poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” was published in 1915. It later appeared in Eliot’s “Prufrock and Other Observations” in 1917. His most famous poem, “The Waste Land,” was published in 1922. In densely symbolic and allusive verse, it described the fragmentation and decay of Western culture. In the same year, Eliot founded the influential quarterly journal The Criterion, which he edited until it ceased publication in 1939.

Eliot was also a literary critic who wrote reviews for the Times Literary Supplement, among other publications. His collection of essays, The Sacred Wood, was published in 1920, and another collection, Homage to John Dryden, appeared in 1924. As a critic, Eliot was a force to be reckoned with both in Great Britain and the United States, and he played a highly influential role as an arbiter of taste and excellence for both poetry of the past and modern poetry. He was known as a champion of the 17th-century English metaphysical poets, whose work had been neglected for over two centuries. His Collected Essays appeared in 1932.

In 1927, Eliot became a British citizen and joined the Anglican Church. “Journey of the Magi” and “Ash Wednesday” (1930) were among the first poetic fruits of this conversion. Over a decade and a half later, in 1944, Eliot published Four Quartets, which also explored spirituality, focusing on the intersection of time and eternity.

Eliot was also a dramatist. His first play, Sweeney Agonistes, was first performed in 1934, followed a year later by Murder in the Cathedral (1935), about the murder of Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170. The latter is generally considered to be Eliot’s best play. In 1949, he achieved popular success with The Cocktail Party (1949), which ran for 409 performances on Broadway starting in January 1950. Two later plays were The Confidential Clerk (1953) and The Elder Statesman (1958).

In 1948, Eliot was awarded the Order of Merit by Britain’s King George VI, as well as the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Eliot married Vivien Haigh-Wood in 1915. By all accounts, it was not a happy marriage. After 1933, they lived apart but did not divorce. Haigh-Wood died in 1947. In 1957, Eliot married Valerie Fletcher, and they enjoyed eight years together before Eliot died on January 4, 1965, in London, of emphysema.

Poem Text

‘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.

Eliot, T. S. “Journey of the Magi.” 1927. The Poetry Archive.

Summary

The poem is narrated by one of the three wise men (Magi) who came from the East to Bethlehem to pay homage to the infant Jesus. The poem comprises three stanzas. In the first stanza, the Magus recalls the many difficulties they endured on the journey. It was a very cold winter and proved too much for some of the camels. The camel drivers complained and acted irresponsibly. Sometimes the Magi thought regretfully of the summer palaces they had vacated back home. Accommodations were scarce, and the cities, towns, and villages where they stayed were not welcoming. The Magi eventually decided to travel at night, all the time wondering if their expedition was a foolish mistake.

In the second stanza, the imagery becomes more optimistic. They reach a valley where there is a stream, a water mill, trees, and a horse. Then they come to a tavern where some men are gambling for pieces of silver. No one has any information for them, but they continue and finally reach their destination.

In the third stanza, the Magus reflects on these long-ago events for someone who writes down his words. The Magus wonders whether they were led to Bethlehem for a birth or a death. Something new had come into the world, which meant that the old order had to die. This was a painful process for the three Magi. When they returned home, they were no longer comfortable in their kingdoms, because their people still retained belief in their old, traditional gods. The Magus concludes that he would now welcome his own death.