In addition to Eliot’s “The Journey of the Magi,” which I posted here, we also read and discussed G.K. Chesterton’s poem, “The Wise Men” as part of our discussion of Fr. Dwight Longenecker’s book, The Mystery of the Magi: The Quest to Identify the Three Wise Men. You can read the four part blog posts on Longenecker’s book: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.
The Wise Men
By G.K. Chesterton (1913)
Step softly, under snow
or rain,
To find the place where men can pray;
The way is all so very
plain
That
we may lose the way.
Oh, we have learnt to
peer and pore,
On tortured puzzles from our youth,
We know all labyrinthine
lore,
We are the three Wise Men
of yore,
And we know all things but the truth.
We have gone round and
round the hill,
And lost the wood among the trees,
And learnt long names for
every ill,
And served the made gods,
naming still
The Furies the Eumenides.
The gods of violence took
the veil
Of vision and philosophy,
The Serpent that brought
all men bale,
He bites his own accursed
tail,
And calls himself Eternity.
Go humbly . . . it has
hailed and snowed . . .
With voices low and lanterns lit;
So very simple is the
road,
That we may stray from it.
The world grows terrible
and white,
And blinding white the breaking day;
We walk bewildered in the
light,
For something is too
large for sight,
And something much too plain to say.
The Child that was ere
worlds begun ─
(. . . We need but walk a
little way . . .
We need but see a latch
undone . . .)
The Child that played
with moon and sun
Is playing with a little hay.
The house from which the
heavens are fed,
The old strange house that is our own,
Where tricks of words are
never said,
And Mercy is as plain as
bread,
And Honour is as hard as stone.
Go humbly; humble are the
skies,
And low and large and fierce the Star,
So very near the Manger
lies
That we may travel far.
Hark! Laughter like a
lion wakes
To roar to the resounding plain,
And the whole heaven
shouts and shakes
For God Himself is born again
And we are little
children walking
Through the snow and rain.
You
can hear “The Wise Men” read on YouTube, here:
So I have to say I was a little confused by the different forms of the stanzas. There are three forms, a quatrain (four lines), a cinquain (five lines), and a sestet (six lines). The stanzas are all in iambic meter (unstressed/stressed syllable pattern) and are of eight syllables (referred to as four feet) long. The quatrains and the sestet end with a shortened line of six syllables. I should also mention that the quatrain and the sestet also have an alternating ABAB (and a concluding AB for the sestet) rhyme scheme while the cinquain has an ABAAB rhyme scheme.
So the eight syllabic line quatrain, including the shortened fourth line, is a classic ballad form. There are variations on this, but what Chesterton chose might be most common. They are typically narrative and the form harkens back to the Middle Ages, though they returned to popularity in the 19th century.
The cinquain was not as typical but also made a comeback in the 19th century. The 19th century poets strove for musicality, and Chesterton really comes from that tradition. The great heyday of the cinquain I would say was in the 17th century. “Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness” by John Donne is a really fine example. That fifth line gives a cinquain more of a contemplative feel.
Finally a sestet echoes the last six lines of an Italian sonnet, which among other things gives a closure to a thought.
In all there are ten stanzas, arranged in what I would consider a pattern: 4-5-5-5-4-5-5-5-4-6, where four stands for a quatrain, five for a cinquain, and six for the sestet. There’s no such established form that I could find, so I would say it’s Chesterton’s creation. And like the Victorian poets whose lineage he comes from (think Tennyson, Poe, Rossetti, even Yeats and others) the musical/sound experience is paramount to his construction. And as I look at each of the stanzas, I would say they function in their classical sense. Though not perfectly, the quatrains are narrative, the cinquains are contemplative, and the sestet brings it to a conclusion. That’s pretty innovative and yet traditional at the same time!
Now what’s the narrative about? Yes, the Magi traveling to Jesus, but what I can’t distinguish is whether it’s an actual Magi speaking or someone in Chesterton’s present time (the narrator?) taking on the persona of a Magi. It seems to blur. What do people think on that? Is it one or the other or both? I just can’t make up my mind.
Now what I would do at this point is identify the central idea of each stanza. Here’s my best guess.
Stanza 1: Journey to a place to pray, which I take is the Magi kneeling before the manger as in a crèche scene. I’m also struck by the paradox that way is plain but easy to lose one’s way.
Stanza 2: Describes the studious nature of the Magi with another paradox that despite their learning they don’t know the truth.
Stanza 3: Further describes the Magi learning, but this time characterized as caught in a circular trap serving merciless pagan gods.
Stanza 4: He describes these gods as hiding the truth, bringing evil by linking them to the serpent. What’s fascinating here is he has another reference to circular, the serpent biting his tail is a circle, and he identifies it as a false eternity.
Now take a break here. I would say that stanzas one through four are the first chunk of thought. Let’s call this Part 1. It concerns the Magi’s fruitless existence prior to encountering Christ.
Stanza 5: The journey continues. Again Chesterton brings up the paradox about getting lost on a simple road.
Stanza 6: A description of the whirlwind of snow about them, being blinded by a light, and paradoxically (again!) not being able to see something that is “too large for sight.”
Stanza 7: A walking into the stable to find the Christ child. Best lines in the poem: “The Child that played with moon and sun/Is playing with a little hay.”
Stanza 8: I have to admit, I am baffled by this stanza. Which house? The Magi’s home? The stable? The house of the narrator? This feels like the philosophic center of the poem but I can’t get it.
OK, those last four stanzas can be called Part 2. The reach the Christ child and are overwhelmed.
Stanza 9: I think they walk up to the manger here, and again another paradox: they are near but yet so far still to go. I take that as they still have a journey to comprehend the significance.
Stanza 10: So this concludes with a roaring laughter. Why? And another paradox, “God Himself is born again.” “Again”? When was He born the first time? But the concluding couplet is very striking: they have suddenly, I assume metaphorically, become children “walking through snow and rain.”
So what I take from that last stanza is that the joy of meeting the Christ child transforms the narrators (he refers to a “we”) into children playing in snow. The once drudgery of the journey is a sort of child’s play now. This, and the plain too that the lion roars on, brings the poem back to the first stanza of snow and rain. It gives the poem a circular feel.
This leaves me with some unanswered questions. So why the circular form and how does that relate to the serpent’s evil circular image in Part 1? What is stanza 8 all about? Why the laughter as a concluding image—it seems to come from nowhere? And what about the narrator? Is it the wise men of yore or present day speaker?
Still
I became very fond of the poem as I understood it! That was enjoyable.
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