Journey of the Magi by T.S. Eliot poem line by line explanation, British Literature - III, 2nd Year 3rd Semester, B.A English Literature

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B.A English Literature

[2nd Year, 3rd Semester]

British Literature

Unit -1 

1.5. Journey of the Magi by T.S. Eliot

About Poet:

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on September 26, 1888, in St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.

        He was a poet, verse dramatist and literary critic who grew up in America and studied at Harvard, the Sorbonne and Oxford. He settled in England in 1914.

        His first collection of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, in 1917.  In 1922 Eliot wrote The Waste Land, one of the most influential and important poems of the 20th century. He became the editor of the literary journal The Criterion, which published The Waste Land in 1925. He became a British citizen in 1927.

        The Four Quartets, a collection of four long poems, published in 1943. He won Nobel Prize for literature in 1948.

He died from emphysema in January, 1965.

About Poem:

"Journey of the Magi" is a 43-line poem written in 1927 by T. S. Eliot, first published in 1927 in a series of pamphlets related to Christmas.

        It is one of five poems that Eliot contributed for a series of 38 pamphlets by several authors collectively titled “Ariel” poems and released by British publishing house Faber & Faber.

        T.S. Eliot’s dramatic monologue focuses upon the famous biblical story.

Poem Theme:

Journey of the Magi is a poem that explores the journey the wise men took when following the star to Bethlehem where the Christ child was born. It is a metaphorical poem, representing both birth and death, renewal and spiritual rebirth.

        The speaker's voice is that of a magus, one of the three travelling 'wise men' or Persian priests (or Zoroastrian astrologers) and the narrative is split into three separate sections:

Stanza 1 - the frustration and doubt of such a journey (the journey to the birthplace and the doubt).

Stanza 2 - the anticipation and understated satisfaction upon arrival (the arrival, the prefiguring and satisfaction).

Stanza 3 - the reflection on birth and death and alienation (the reflection and acknowledgement of a new faith).

Poem:

“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.

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