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, sore-footed, 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 arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place, it was (you may 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.

T.S. Eliot (1927)



It has been a while since I have tried to make sense of poetry, and I don't dare to expect anything from myself after nearly 4 years' absence from English Literature studies. Although I have no intention of attempting to write an intricate study of the poem above, delving into Eliot's work still feels like jumping into the deep end (and so it should always be) .

It may be what Eliot himself is doing in his poem: contemplating a leap into the unknown, deliberating a difficult, apparently senseless choice made by one of the wise men, possibly reflecting on his own journey from agnosticism to Christianity the same year. "The very dead of winter" that the wise man speaks of in the poem resounds a state all too familiar to us: our lives not going the way we plan, our means of moving towards our goal "refractory".

"Finding the place...satisfactory", the speaker is clearly enriched by his arduous travels, but, interestingly, the "silken girls bringing sherbet" and other comforts that he longed for on his journey no longer seem to be of importance:

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.

The journey has changed his attitude, his way of thinking, his calling. "Our places" are now the abode of "an alien people". The speaker does not identify himself with "these Kingdoms" anymore. In fact, returning home, he is the one who is estranged, "an alien" in his own land. His painfully beautiful journey embellished with affliction and crowned with an inexplicable "hard and bitter agony" leaves the wise man all the more thirsty for meaning in his life.

Rather than seeing the poem merely as an analogy of Eliot's conversion, the reader is left with a lingering feeling, another feeling of loss and an absence of identity. The speaker is a foreigner as he wanders through "the cities hostile and towns unfriendly", and the end of the poem sees him a foreigner even at home. He feels an acute discomfort, but he cannot pinpoint it. He "should be glad of another death", perhaps in order to feel like he is heading towards a goal again and to achieve a sense of meaning. "The very dead of winter" made the wise man doubt and feel uneasy, "with the voices...saying/That this was all folly", making him uncomfortably human. Yet in his doubts and uneasiness he feels more comfortable than when he is back in his "summer palaces on slopes".

The Journey of the Magi does not bring closure. It vexes its reader and raises more questions: Why "another death"? Why is returning home perhaps even more uncomfortable than constantly moving towards something that, albeit "folly", gives you some kind of direction in life?