Eliot’s poem, “Journey of the Magi,” is based on the journey of the Three Wise Men to see Christ in the book of Matthew. The first part of the poem tells about how hard the journey is—“’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.’” Even the camels are unhappy. The kings are used to “summer palaces on slopes, the terraces, / And the silken girls bringing sherbet.” The men they hired to keep the camels didn’t want to work, they wanted “their liquor and women” instead. They were never warm, and had no shelter; the cities were unfriendly. Eventually the men just traveled all night because it was easier that way. They had “voices singing in our ears, saying / That this was all folly.” The voices are telling them that they are going through all of this hardship for nothing.
Then at last, they “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.” At last they are getting somewhere! After they got to their destination, they went back to their kingdoms—“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.” After they have seen Christ, they are no longer at ease in their palaces, and their people who worship different gods seem as aliens. The kings have seen the way they are supposed to live, and no longer feel comfortable in this life. “I should be glad of another death,” implies that they want to be with Christ, in the afterlife.
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4 comments:
I do agree with you that Eliot's poem, "Journey of the Magi" is based on the three Wise Men journey to see the Christ but from a different perspective than what we are used to in the Bible. Rather than giving the traditional biblical story that most of us are used to hearing, the author did a brilliant job and turned the story into poetry as was told from the viewpoint of one of the wise men. He talked about the difficulties that they faced along the journey and the outcome of their trip and how their lives were changed.
You did a great job in quoting various passages from the poem and analysing them. In my opinion, I was a little disappointed that the author did not tell us more about this baby.
I liked that Eliot gave us a more personal response to the three wise men's journey to see Christ. I think you did a great job in giving me your interpretation of the poem.
I would have liked for you yo give moer details of your internal interpretation. Great job!
Lindsay,
You do a good job in this, your final post, of presenting important quotations from the poem for discussion. You don't really spend enough time discussing them, though; I think it would have been preferable to quote fewer passages and to go into more depth in your analysis of them.
It is interesting to see a story of the three wise men. We know they made a journey bringing there gifts but Eliot gives good insight on the story from the viewpoint of the wisemen.
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