Journey of the Magi by T. S. Eliot

First published: 1927; collected in Collected Poems, 1909-1935, 1936

Type of poem: Dramatic monologue

The Poem

From the time that he prepared “The Hollow Men” for publication in 1925 until he wrote “Journey of the Magi” in July, 1927, T. S. Eliot wrote virtually no poetry at all. His personal convictions underwent enormous upheaval during that two-year hiatus, culminating in his baptism into the Church of England on June 29, 1927. Shortly thereafter, the editor at Faber & Gwyer publishers, for whom Eliot worked as an editor, asked Eliot to write a Christmas poem as one in a series of short, illustrated poems called the Ariel Poems. The result was “Journey of the Magi,” published on August 25, 1927. It was, as Eliot said in an interview published in The New York Times Book Review (November 29, 1953), the poem that released the stream for all his future work. Thus the poem bears personal as well as artistic significance for Eliot.

“Journey of the Magi” is a first-person recollection of a Magus, one of the Persian Magi who came to visit the Christ child as recorded in the second chapter of Matthew. The poem is narrated, however, from the perspective of many years later, after the Magus has returned to his home country. He is an elderly man, reflecting on events that occurred many years prior.

The recollection is divided into three parts. The first stanza recalls the journey itself, the long and demanding ordeal of the caravan to Judaea. The weather was very cold and sharp; the camels had sores and often balked; the camel drivers were unhappy at their deprivations and ran away. There was little shelter, and the people they met were unfriendly: “A hard time we had of it.” The second stanza describes their arrival, at dawn, at the Judaean valley, where they at last find a hospitable landscape with water and vegetation. In the stanza’s last two lines, they arrive at Bethlehem, “not a moment too soon,” and find the infant Christ.

The third stanza consists of a reflection on the meaning of the event. Here the Magus struggles with the significance of birth and death. He is aware of the prophecy that the Christ was born to die as an atonement, but he also reflects on his own approaching death.

It is helpful while reading the poem to remember that the Magi were king-priests of the royal tribe of Medes and that their primary tasks were to understand astronomical signs, to interpret dreams, and to understand prophecy. Their entire knowledge of the Christ derived from the Hebrew kingdom during its exile in Babylon beginning in 605 b.c.e., when Nebuchadnezzar conquered Judah. The most influential figure of that period was the Hebrew Daniel, who lived for sixty-six years in Persia and who prophesied the Messiah (Daniel 7:14).

Forms and Devices

This relatively simple story of the Magi is tightly packed with significance, particularly in Eliot’s use of allusion and symbolism.

The poem bears echoes of authors who influenced Eliot’s own spiritual journey, most notably Lancelot Andrewes. The poem opens with a quotation taken from Lancelot Andrewes’s Nativity sermon, preached in 1622 to the Jacobean court. As he pointed out in his essay “Lancelot Andrewes” (Selected Essays, 1934), Eliot admired Andrewes’s intellectual achievement, his ability to hold both intellectual idea and emotional sensibility in harmony, and his leadership in the church of seventeenth century England. Andrewes seemed to validate church membership for Eliot at a time when he was contemplating his own baptism into the church.

Furthermore, the staccato-like lines of the last section of the poem—the hesitation, repetition, and acceleration—were all techniques that Eliot admired in Andrewes’s prose style. Eliot’s lines in stanza 3, “but set down/ This set down/ This” also derive from patterns that Andrewes used in his Nativity sermons of 1616, 1622, and 1623.

“Journey of the Magi” creates more interest, however, by its complex pattern of biblical symbolism, which intensifies in stanza 2 as the Magi approach Bethlehem and the birth of the Christ. The symbolism seems to accelerate, as does the journey itself, toward its fulfillment.

The valley they enter is cut by a flowing stream, suggesting Jesus’ claim to be the Living Water in John 4:10-14, and this living stream powers a mill that seems to beat away the darkness, further suggesting Jesus’ claim in John 8:12 to be the Light of the World. With the dawning of this light, however, the Magi see first of all a symbol of death—“three trees on the low sky,” or on the western horizon.

As they enter the valley, an old white horse gallops away. The reference here cannot be to the white horse of Revelation 19:11, as some have assumed, since that horse bears the Christ at his second coming. Rather, it refers to the white horse of Zechariah 6:5, whose task it was to announce the coming of the Messiah. That task now completed, the horse gallops away.

The Magi arrive at the first outpost of civilization and see, at a tavern, vine leaves over the lintel, suggesting the Old Testament Passover and Christ’s fulfillment of it in his claim that he is the True Vine (John 15:1, 5). The next two lines were recorded earlier than the drafting of the poem in a notebook that Eliot kept, but they do fit the biblical pattern. The hands dicing for silver suggest the bartering for Christ (Matthew 26:14-16), and the feet kicking the empty wine-skins suggest Jesus’ parable of the new wine in Matthew 9:17.

Led by such signs, the Magi arrive at the Christ child, finding the place and deeming it “satisfactory.” The adjective satisfactory has troubled some readers, since it seems to understate the event, or to show some disappointment. That may be so. After all, the Magi were kingly priests seeking a king, and they found instead a rude stable. It may also be that Eliot employs the term “satisfactory” based on his study in philosophy, drawing upon the philosophical definition as a necessary and sufficient fulfillment of the signs given. As such, it is a statement of resolute conviction.

The Magus who tells the poem is, in any event, so powerfully taken by the event that years later it still disturbs him profoundly. The disturbance arises from the paradox of birth and death, the fact that this Messiah was also the one destined to die on one of the “three trees on the low sky.” In fact, the Crucifixion may already have occurred and come to the Magus’s knowledge. Thus he puzzles over the paradox: The Christ was born to die, and believers are dying to an old way of life, to be born again. He does not fully understand the puzzle, but he takes considerable solace from it, claiming that he would now be glad of his own physical death.

Bibliography

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Browne, Elliott Martin. The Making of T. S. Eliot’s Plays. London: Cambridge University Press, 1969.

Donoghue, Denis. Words Alone: The Poet, T. S. Eliot. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000.

Eliot, Valerie, ed. The Letters of T. S. Eliot, 1898-1922. Vol. 1. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988.

Gordon, Lyndall. Eliot’s Early Years. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Gordon, Lyndall. Eliot’s New Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988.

Gordon, Lyndall. T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life. New York: Norton, 1999.

Litz, A. Walton, ed. Eliot in His Time: Essays on the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of “The Waste Land.” Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973.

Schuchard, Ronald. Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.