Confessing Evangelical

The last of my posts for National Poetry Day, and (while I said this wasn't an exercise in posting "my favourite poems") this last poem certainly is a contender for that title. TS Eliot again, but this time wiping his eyes after another raucous read-through of "Macavity", and saying "Now, let's be serious".

Again, you really should read the whole of this poem (Christmas Eve is a good time to do so, as it's a wonderful antidote to all the Christmas froth), but here are the first and final stanzas, just to whet your appetite:

The Journey of the Magi

"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. [...]

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.

Read the whole thing here.

The opening lines are based on a sermon by Lancelot Andrewes, whose writings were apparently instrumental in bringing about Eliot's conversion to Christianity. Andrewes' 1622 sermon on Matthew 2:1-2 includes the following:

Last we consider the time of their coming, the season of the year. It was no summer progress. A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, in solsitio brumali, "the very dead of winter".

I also read some helpful notes on the poem a few years ago which I may try to find again (think this may be it), which made some particularly interesting points on a couple of lines in the penultimate stanza. First, it suggested that the line "...And three trees on the low sky" symbolises the crucifixion. Secondly, the line "...it was (you may say) satisfactory" is a reference to Christ's coming to the atone for our sins: for those of us who come after the Magi ("you may say"), the coming of Christ was indeed "satisfactory", in the sense of His making satisfaction for our sins.

If you think that's a bit of a stretch, then bear in mind that TS Eliot does have "previous" for including blatant, if slightly oblique, Christian references in his poems, and then denying all knowledge of it. For example, the following stanza from The Wasteland:

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you?

According to Eliot's notoriously unhelpful notes to the poem, these lines "were stimulated by the account of one of the Antarctic expeditions (I forget which, but I think one of Shackleton's): it was related that the party of explorers, at the extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more member than could actually be counted." So, nothing to do with the road to Emmaus at all. No, sir-ree.

Similarly helpful was his response when he was asked what he had meant by the baffling line (from Ash Wednesday) "Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree". Eliot replied, "I meant, 'Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree'". Cheers, Tom.