T.S. Eliot's 'Journey of the Magi'

T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

A poem in three movements. In the first, Eliot catches the grumbling voice of a man unaccustomed to hard travelling, remembering the uncomfortable details of a preposterous journey. In the second, the Magi find what they thought they were looking for ‘and it was (you may say) satisfactory’. And in the third, the speaker admits to the ambiguity of that experience which marked the end of ‘the old dispensation’ and left him stranded between a death and a birth.

From Caedmon to the beginning of the Twentieth century, a poet writing in English could assume a shared Christian background with 99 percent of potential readers. I stopped using this poem in class a few decades ago. It wasn’t that the white horse, three crosses and dicing men were too obscure, or even that the word Magi was unfamiliar. The event at the centre of the poem, which the speaker assumes is well-known and therefore doesn’t need to be described in any detail, had to be explained.

This poem is taken from T.S.Eliot: The Complete Poems and Plays.