T.S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” — another Christmas poem

One of Eliot’s post-conversion-to-Christianity poems, “Journey” is essentially a monologue delivered by one of the “wise men” who journeyed perhaps hundreds of miles long ago to visit the Messiah, if not in his infancy, at least in the earliest years. A manifestly modern poem, it captures that period of time when the world and the individual were being introduced to Christianity. The speaker makes references throughout to elements of his old world and ways, the “silken girls, ” the food, his sumptuous surroundings, as he contemplates what all this means and why he has made this difficult journey.

He cannot fully embrace the new faith, nor can he fully abjure the only life he knows. He knows a few things. One is that even though the trip is about a birth, it is also about a death. He knows the prophecies about that. And here, stuck in the middle, between dispensations, he feels unsure of himself, but resigned.

The poet ends with the speaker’s longing for ”another death.” But which is it? Whose? Eliot is ambiguous, but it doesn’t matter. Both Christ’s death and the speaker’s death are forever linked. Here is the last stanza:

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. 

This link is supposed to be Eliot himself reading this poem, but I can’t guarantee it. The full text of the poem is there, too.

http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=7070