Many of my students object to Eliot after their initial introduction to him. His religious images are too tense or dark for them; perhaps he touches their own conflicts, which they'd rather have smoothed away in the intellectual intrigues of the Metaphysicals or the rollicking fancies of the Romantics. I love to use this poem to show them that Eliot always has a shadowy sort of hope in his post-baptismal poetry, even when he remains brutally honest about the struggles of living in the modern world.
Here are some (very brief!) reflections on his poem, appropriate for Epiphany today . . . the italicized words are his own. He composed it shortly after his own baptism (a very difficult period in his life).
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| I like these magi; they look beat up from the journey, as Eliot describes. |
'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.'
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.
No fresh-faced kings with smiling servants here . . . the Magi, like us during the Advent season, have left behind a comfortable, materialistic life [There were times we regretted . . .] in favor of a pilgrimage to a new life, a new truth. Even their companions on the journey are disloyal [running away] and unfocused [wanting their liquor and women.] Amidst the difficulties, the worst are the voices in their own minds that wonder if eschewing the world and taking this hard path is really worth it after all.
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.
These images are beautiful and rich with meaning! I'll focus your attention on a couple. As they approach the Christ-Child, the world is temperate and thus fruitful (or potentially so). Yet, the people there have "no information;" they are oblivious to the deeper happenings nearby. At the same time, many of the landmarks portend dark things--the water mill is seen contending against the "darkness" and the "three trees" on the horizon portend Christ's own death on a tree with the two criminals at his side. I also like that they find the stable "satisfactory;" they do not fall into superfluous praise or a panegyric on the irony of a god placed in a manger. At the same time, these magi do not decide finally that "this was all folly" because the stable is merely "satisfactory" at best. Implied may also be the sense that anything God chose for his Son must be "satisfactory" and beyond our human scale of judgement to declare otherwise.
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.
A true experience of God is not easily forgotten and must be shared, as the author's insistence to "set down / This" indicates here. The next reflection on the blending of Birth and Death in the same event reminds me of Donne's very different treatment of the same theme in "Upon the Annunciation and Passion Falling Upon One Day." Christ's Birth began the sacrifice that culminated in His innocent Death. Our own participation in the life of Christ and our initiation in Baptism grants us a re-birth in the spirit, but that re-birth is also a death to the old self and an invitation to carry Christ's cross along with Him in this life. The Magi witnessed the Infant Christ. Yet, this event and their ratified belief for which they now have "evidence" from a personal encounter with God has made them strangers in their own homes. The people they shepherded previously are "alien" to them, and the magi have the insight now to see that their faith in pagan gods is desperate. The life of a follower of Christ is often a path of rejection; in so far as we stand up for our beliefs, we may also find that "no prophet is accepted in his own country." But here is Eliot's sense of hope . . . the author, in the final analysis, would be "glad of another death." Whether this refers to another meeting with Christ and metaphorical death to self or to the author's final, physical death and reunion with his Maker, it is worth the cost. If the world sees this choice as "folly," the wise men have learned that "the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength" (1 Cor 1:25).
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