Great, another Christmas poem.

Eliot is not among those poets known as excellent readers of their work. But it's worth a listen, if only to hear that he pronounces the word "MAY-jie."

Journey of the Magi

T.S. Eliot

"A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For the 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.




One of the things I love the most about this poem is how the manger moment is downplayed. "It was (you may say) satisfactory." The point of the journey is ostensibly the whole purpose of the poem, except when it isn't. 


There are a lot of parallels here, well-noted and annotated, to Eliot's conversion to Anglicanism, his own spiritual journey from Death to Birth. I am not as interested in that. Just as I'm not really interested in the wise men. I'm interested in the space between, the place where they meet.


That hard and bitter agony, I think everybody can relate to that around mid-December. It feels especially right for anybody on the long journey of having and keeping your faith. 


Because Christmas is a bad time to be a Christian. 


There's the War on Christmas, the War on War on Christmas, the War on War on War on Christmas... There's the selfish capitalism and the angry sermons against selfish capitalism. Even Linus can't help you get to the true meaning of Christmas.


Right now, thanks to Eliot, I'm glad for any meaning to it at all. If you're trying, brothers and sisters, keep on keeping on.