Epiphany

Looking forward to Hopkins' this friday night (she asked me to read
Eliot's "Journey of the Magi"), I was rereading the poem. And,
since it is appropriate for this day, I give it to you here, followed
by my reflections, as well as by Wystan's:

'A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a 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.

Emily:

In this poem, as in much of Eliot's work, I see the dark night of the
soul--the journey that the magi take is one of deprivation and
darkness (they traveled all night) and death. Death is all tied up in
life--it is in the town in which Christ is crucified that there are vine
leaves over the lintel. This is reminiscent of the refrain in "East 
Coker": "In my beginning is my end." The Magi's journey is outside
of time--as part of their journey, they see the whole of Christ's life,
not only his birth, but also his death. This reminds me of what Eliot
writes in "The Dry Salvages":

"...to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint--
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.

The last three lines of the poem are particularly poignant: the Magi
narrating is no longer comfortable in his kingdom, in the old
dispensation. Here Eliot is pointing to the parallel between the 
Magi's discomfort in their kingdoms after their encounter with
Christ, and the way in which Christianity makes people fit
uncomfortably in their own political and cultural time. There are
strong Augustinian influences in this insight.

Wystan:

The poem is, itself, remarkable within Eliot's work as the one place
in which he really grapples with what it means to be human, which
is to say, with what it means to have a body. The first two stanzas
are almost entirely sensual, concerned with a litany of ailments,
with strange, foreign and unhelpful bodies, with the memories of
pleasure. Its most remarkable moment is the final stanza.

For those attached to the endless cycles of the liturgical year, it is
commonplace to note that each moment on the calendar looks
back on the past and anticipates what is yet to come. The first
notes of Easter come on Good Friday, and Easter points on to the
Ascension and Pentecost. It is a happy coincidence when, for
those who celebrate both, the Annunciation falls in Holy Week,
and in Christmas there is always at least a note of the Good
Friday sacrifice to come.

Eliot here smashes this concept to pieces. The Birth, always
capitalized, upsets the order of all things: the Birth means the
Death. It is not easy and happy, but "hard and bitter agony."
The Magi come for reasons they do not even understand, and in
their journey are teased by the memories of what they left, what
they would call home. By the time they leave, they have been
altered completely: no longer at ease, with an alien people
clutching to 'their' gods.

Perhaps here we have a view of Eliot different than our view of
him as paradigmatic High Church Anglican. The Incarnation
means everything is different. No one should dare to remain
unchanged, if that were even possible. To encounter Christ, for
Eliot, is to see what Paul saw: He is the first one to go down to
death, and His death must be ours. The visit of the Magi is not
the triumphant recognition of Christ as King, but the
recognition that all knowledge and wisdom fails in His
presence.