Happy feast of the Epiphany! Earlier this week, the wonderful Anthony Esolen (whose translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy is mine and my husband’s favourite) posted a substack on T. S. Eliot’s poem ‘The Journey of the Magi’ (1927). (Here is his post if you’re interested, I recommend it!)
Inspired by Esolen, I’ve decided to share a few thoughts about this striking poem with you. First of all, here is a link to the poem which includes a recording by Eliot himself.
As soon as I read ‘Journey of the Magi’, I sent it to my husband (it was the first time reading it for both of us). He was struck, as is often the case with Eliot, by how colloquial and ‘modern’ sounding it is. Eliot is writing about the Magi’s journey to meet the baby Jesus as reflecting our own earthly pilgrimage towards God. This is nothing new, as it is part of a long tradition of seeing Epiphany in this way, but Eliot’s own recounting of the story feels at once familiar, and yet new and striking. The language is toned-down, elemental, Anglo-Saxon in vocabulary and syntax - no fancy Latinate sentences here! It is also, by Eliot’s standards, surprisingly accessible. While some of his earlier poetry was notoriously obscure and allusive (The Wasteland being the best-known example of this), ‘Journey of the Magi’ is almost arrestingly straightforward. I’ve noticed this about a lot of the poetry Eliot wrote after his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism, which happened the same year that this particular poem was written. Later Eliot works are, to me, most beautiful in their simplicity.
While the whole poem is definitely worth reading, it is the last stanza that really captured by imagination. Written in the first person singular - like we, as readers, are experiencing exactly what the magi are experiencing - the last stanza captures the overwhelming joy and fear caused by the sight of God, become man as a small, helpless child:
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 have 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.
This stanza’s discussion of the meaning of birth and death is what I’m truly amazed by. Last year, I wrote an essay for Fairer Disputations about Julian of Norwich’s description of Christ’s death as a kind of spiritual birth for us, the faithful. Eliot’s lines about birth and death here remind me of that. Were they witnessing birth of death, the magi wonders? They had ‘thought they were different’, but it turned out that ‘this Birth was / Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death’. In one sense, Christ’s birth already prefigures his death on the cross, of course. But I think something different is going on here. The magi are experiencing, in witnessing birth, their own death (‘our death’), because spiritual conversion is a kind of death of the self. For martyrs declaring their faith in the face of a faithless world, this death is quite literal. For the rest of us, a metaphorical death follows conversion - a death to the self, to the world, and to everything we knew before. This must have been particularly poignant for Eliot to write, since this poem was written shortly after he found his own faith.
Conversion is hard. After seeing the baby Jesus, the magi feel disorientated. They return home, but it doesn’t feel like home anymore. They are ‘no longer at ease’; their own ‘Kingdoms’ are filled with an ‘alien people’. Anyone who has converted but whose family did not make the same step, will know exactly what this feels like. This process of alienation is painful, but it is one through which, following disorientation, our sense of purpose is re-orientated and our priorities reordered. We now live for Christ, not for the world. That is difficult to explain to people; it makes us feel separate from our old selves.
And yet there is joy in conversion, too. It is this final sense of joy on which Eliot dwells in the very last line of the poem: ‘I should be glad of another death’. This death is a good death. It may be misunderstood or even mocked by the world, but it is a death that brings rebirth and eternal life. It is gladness not in the sense of being pleased, but in the deeper sense of being at peace. Just as the magi find this peace, we can too on this day, the feast of the Epiphany, if we but remind ourselves that God is with us in our trials. And if following the path he sets for us seems hard and alienating sometimes, it’s probably because he is working on our souls. It is hard work, but good work. May we all undertake it with joy this coming year.
Beatrice - thank you for your beautiful reflections on the T.S. Eliot poem. I had never read “Journey of the Magi” before, and your reflections helped me to understand it better! Happy Epiphany!!