Given the similarity in themes, this poem, “The Journey of the Magi” by T.S. Eliot and G.K. Chesterton’s poem “The Wise Men” were part of the discussion at the end of Fr. Dwight Longenecker’s book, The Mystery of the Magi: The Quest to Identify the Three Wise Men. So this and a coming post on Chesterton’s poem are associated as Magi posts. You can read the four part blog posts on Longenecker’s book: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.
Here
is Eliot’s poem.
The Journey of the Magi
By T.S. Eliot
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.
You can listen to T.S. Eliot reading his own poem here:
First we should note the form of the poem. We have three uneven stanzas, the first of twenty lines, the second of eleven lines, and the third of twelve lines. It is in free verse of uneven line length with no rhyme scheme. It’s pretty close to natural speech. If you could summarize the theme of each stanza, one could say the first is the journey, the second is the arrival, and the third is trying to comprehend the experience. We see that the first two stanzas, the narrator speaks in the inclusive “we” while in the third he shifts to the personal “I.”
We see that in the first stanza the journey was difficult: cold, long, dirty, expensive, sleepless, having to sustain uncouth and repulsive workers and hostile cities, all the while dreaming of the “silken girls” of summer back home and hearing the voices in his head saying it was “folly.” The details are of bodily lusts, and of other sinful and unkind acts, and the scenery of a waste land of winter, dead snow, nothing growing. The central animal imagery is of camels who are “galled,” that is to say chafed, irate, who are “sorefooted,” that is struggling, and “refractory,” that is to say resistant, stubborn. In fact, the word “refractory,” an odd word to use in a poem, characterizes the whole first stanza: resistance.
In the second stanza, the narrator comes to a “temperate valley,” echoing perhaps the land of milk and honey. We have “vegetation,” so we have life. We have running water and civilization with the wind-mill, and a horse, this stanza’s central animal image, in the meadow. We have allusions to the sacraments, a running stream for baptism, vegetation with a wind mill suggesting grain milled into flour for bread, and a tavern with vine leaves suggesting wine. But we have not come to Eden. Interwoven we have images of the crucifixion: the three trees and hands dicing for silver, and feet kicking “empty wine-skins.” But the narrator concludes with the word “satisfactory,” the word that I think characterizes this stanza and which by the way rhymes with the word “refractory” from the previous. On first blush, “satisfactory” sounds anticlimactic until you look at its Latin root of satis, meaning enough, sufficient. Yes what they found was anticlimactic, after all it was only a baby they found, but the baby was “enough,” “sufficient,” “fulfilling.”
In the final stanza what is at first striking is the absolute lack of imagery. There is none. Everything is an abstraction. Birth is a summary descriptive; it lacks any specificity. The same thing with death. There are no images of birth and death given. “Kingdoms,” “evidence,” “remember,” “agony,” and “dispensation” are more abstractions. The closest he comes to an image is with “alien people clutching their gods.” While the clutching of gods is still an abstraction, it does approximate an image, and what a strange way to end a Christian poem with an image of people holding on to their pagan gods. “Dispensation” is I think the word that characterizes this stanza, and I think defines the entire poem. I’ll get to that shortly.
So what are we to make of the entire poem? Yes, it’s the first person account from one of the Magi, but this poem came shortly after Eliot’s profound religious conversion. In a sense perhaps this poem is taking us through his biographical journey. What do we make of the three stanza division? When you see three you kind of think of the Trinity, but unfortunately there is no way to link any of the Persons of the Trinity to the first and second stanza. No that doesn’t fit, but perhaps you can think of this as Dante’s journey through the Divine Comedy, with the first stanza being hell, the second being purgatory, and the third being heaven. That fits rather nicely when you know that Eliot loved Dante.
Perhaps an even better organizing principle is St. Augustine’s City of God. There Augustine constructs the polar opposites of the City of Man versus the City of God, but more importantly he divides the City of Man into two parts, the pagan world and the world of Judaism, that is, of the Old Testament. Could we see the first stanza as sitting in for the pagan world, the second stanza for the world of the Old Testament, and the third stanza for the sublime New Testament’s City of God? I certainly think so. The first stanza is filled with pagan idolatry of wine (liquor), women, and song (voices singing in our ears)! The people around him are completely undisciplined, seeking only satisfying bodily passions. Even the Magi dreams of girls and sherbet. There is no self-sacrifice. Only grumbling of discomforts, hostility, and no turning the other cheek. Even the “folly” of the voices seems to echo St. Paul’s “Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles’ (1 Cor 23). The ‘folly” comes from the perception of gentiles.
In the second stanza I mentioned how we have the rudiments of the sacraments, but unfulfilled, and we even have the lintel of the Passover. We also have the allusions to the crucifixion, and we have the white horse, which I think is a symbol of earthly power, which becomes harnessed in heaven (there are several white horses in the Book of Revelation) but here runs away. The most intriguing image is that of the empty wine-skins. This alludes to Jesus’ parable of the wineskins: “no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins, and it will be spilled, and the skins will be ruined. Rather, new wine must be poured into fresh wineskins” (Lk 5:37-8). In Jesus’ parable, the old wineskin is Israel of the Old Testament. It cannot hold the new wine that is Jesus or the new covenant.
In the final stanza we are met with “Birth” and “Death,” both strikingly capitalized. What Eliot has done here is merged the two. Birth and death are one which is merged in the person of Jesus Christ. Indeed, how many births and deaths can we draw up here? There is Christ of course. There is the Magus narrator who is now born to a new life and realizes that this birth is a mortification—a death to the body. There is the same for the poet Eliot in his personal experience, a new devout Eliot and the old pagan Eliot dead. But there is the death that Christ’s birth conquered through His resurrection, so that with heaven open we all can be born to eternal life. His birth ends death through a new birth. Finally it is no accident I think that the last stanza has twelve lines. The Feast of the Magi is celebrated on the twelfth day of Christmas, but more importantly the number twelve symbolizes completeness in Biblical numerology, not just completeness but fulfillment. The Old Testament is fulfilled in the New. Indeed then one can look back at the other stanzas and link the twenty lines of the first stanza to the undisciplined indulgence of the pagan world, and the eleven lines of the second stanza to the coming short and unfulfilled of the Old Testament world. I don’t know if Eliot had Augustine’s City of God in mind but the construction and details work very well.
Finally I must mention what I think is the greatest poetic flare of the entire poem. I’ve read this poem for decades and never saw this, and it has elevated this poem from a good to a great poem for me. It’s these lines that are so easy to overlook and probably aren’t even comprehensible. They weren’t for me all these years, and for some reason I never stopped to draw their significance. But then I never stopped to break the poem down like this. You miss so much if you don’t analyze a poem in a formal, disciplined way. These lines: “And I would do it again, but set down/This set down/This: were we led all that way for…” It actually sounds discombobulated: “but set down/This set down/This.” Eliot never describes the manger scene, the Christ child, and the holy parents. He can’t. You can’t describe the mystery of the incarnation. It’s beyond words. The experience has overwhelmed him. It is a conversion experience. It is indescribable. It’s the same with my personal religious experience. I was essentially a pagan. I was moved beyond comprehension, and I can’t for the life of me describe it. Words just fail. I assume the same thing happened to Eliot on his conversion. Despite Eliot being the greatest poet in English of the 20th century he can’t describe it. It comes down to a babbling incomprehension. It comes down to “this,” just “this.” Nothing more.
And so when the magus returns to his country, to those “alien people,” he is the one alienated. He has to live in the “old dispensation,” which means in the old order of things. Look up the definition of “dispensation.” (1) A general order or arrangement of things. (2) An exemption from the law or vow or some rule. (3) An act of dispensing, distributing. So he is alienated in the world of the old arrangement; but now exempt from the old law of the Old Testament, and has received the dispensed free grace of God to those of faith. He has been profoundly changed. He has gone through a birth, which is the death of his old self. And awaits the death of his bodily self into a new birth.
You may not like this poem, but it is a rich, rich poem by one of the greatest poets to ever have lived. In just a mere 43 lines, he has taken the reader through a powerful experience.
Also the shift to the personal "I" in the last stanza makes the experience singular. We ultimately go before the Lord as individuals. It is our individual hearts that are changed.
Casey
Commented:
Thank you, Manny. This
was an excellent articulation of the poem and it does help a great deal.
I disagree a bit that one
gains most in analyzing a poem formally. A poem ought to convey that which
cannot be conveyed ordinarily. That is, a poem, as unit, conveys something
complete. I feel this poem fails in that regard.
However, after reading that articulation, I wonder if it fails for me because I have not had the kind of conversion experience you describe. Perhaps the unit of meaning is something that I cannot grasp having not experienced it. As one might never grasp the experience of eating persimmon who has never eaten one.
My
reply to Casey:
Perhaps a little bit. But I think the poem grew on me as I uncovered more and more of its muted poetic elements, even beside that inarticulate moment in the poem. Poems such as this are not as obvious as poems that have established form such as meter and rhyme. Both types of poems have organizing principles, and while the organizing principle is given in say the Chesterton poem, here you have to deduce it. It so happened that I was reading Augustine's City of God the other day and was fresh on my mind. If it's the musicality of poetry that is pleasing to you, then I can understand why this one doesn't suit your taste. But for me it was the connections and the word play (refractory/satisfactory/vegetation/dispensation), the supporting imagery, all culminating in a life changing experience that made me realize it was a great poem. Was it you that used the word "encoded" to see how the Old Testament is found in the New? Someone used that word recently in that context. Eliot does similar. He "encodes" meaning through words and images and progression to pack what could easily be a novel length story into just 43 lines. The beauty of this poem is to see all that.
Kerstin
Commented:
Manny, I get the feeling you like the puzzling out of wordplays, the detective work of looking what is deeper in these types of poems by picking the language apart. To me this looks like a lot of work. I like it a little easier presented, give me the imagery in ready to comprehend pieces. But I think this has to do with what sorts of things we enjoy and where our aptitudes lay. I can spend countless hours learning about traditional/ancestral preserving and cooking methods, trying to perfect making country paté, mayonnaise, or sourdough bread. The hours can fly by and I don't even notice. I can imagine you can spend this kind of time delighting in what you can uncover in a poem.
My
Reply to Kerstin:
LOL, well yes. But the puzzling out is not the objective. The objective is to understand the artistry. It's not just poems or novels but paintings and symphonies and such. For some people understanding the artistry takes the wonder out of the work. For others understanding the artistry gives the work its full wonder. I'm in the latter category.
My
Comment:
Oh I'm sorry you guys
don't like this. It's really a great poem.
If you didn't like Eliot
reading it himself, you should listen to this great read by Sir john Gielgood:
Or this reading by this
young man, Tim Martin. I have no idea
who he is, but this might be the very best reading:
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