the journey of the magi essay

Journey of the Magi Summary & Analysis by T. S. Eliot

• Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis
• Poetic Devices
• Vocabulary & References
• Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme
• Line-by-Line Explanations

"Journey of the Magi" is a poem by T.S. Eliot, first published in 1927 in a series of pamphlets related to Christmas. The poem was written shortly after Eliot's conversion to the Anglican faith. Accordingly, though the poem is an allegorical dramatic monologue that inhabits the voice of one the magi (the three wise men who visit the infant Jesus), it's also generally considered to be a deeply personal poem. Indeed, the magus in the poem shares Eliot's view that spiritual transformation is not a comfort, but an ongoing process—an arduous journey seemingly without end. The magus's view on the birth of Jesus—and the shift from the old ways to Christianity—is complex and ambivalent.

• Read the full text of “Journey of the Magi”

The Full Text of “Journey of the Magi”

“journey of the magi” summary, “journey of the magi” themes.

Spiritual Death and Rebirth

Line-by-line explanation & analysis of “journey of the magi”.

'A cold coming ... ... dead of winter.'

And the camels ... ... girls bringing sherbet.

Lines 11-16

Then the camel ... ... had of it.

Lines 17-20

At the end ... ... was all folly.

Lines 21-25

Then at dawn ... ... in the meadow.

Lines 26-31

Then we came ... ... might say) satisfactory.

Lines 32-36

All this was ... ... Birth or Death?

Lines 36-39

There was a ... ... Death, our death.

Lines 40-43

We returned to ... ... of another death.

“Journey of the Magi” Symbols

Biblical Imagery

• Line 23: “running stream”
• Line 24: “three trees on the low sky”
• Line 25: “an old white horse”
• Line 26: “vine-leaves”
• Line 27: “pieces of silver”
• Line 28: “empty wine-skins”

“Journey of the Magi” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

Alliteration.

• Line 1: “cold coming”
• Line 4: “ways,” “deep,” “weather”
• Line 5: “dead,” “winter”
• Line 9: “summer,” “slopes”
• Line 10: “silken”
• Line 11: “camel,” “cursing”
• Line 12: “wanting,” “women”
• Line 18: “Sleeping,” “snatches”
• Line 19: “singing,” “saying”
• Line 20: “That this”
• Line 21: “dawn,” “down,” “valley”
• Line 22: “snow,” “smelling,” “vegetation”
• Line 27: “Six,” “door dicing,” “silver”
• Line 31: “say) satisfactory.”
• Line 35: “were we,” “way”
• Line 37: “doubt,” “death”
• Line 38: “But,” “different,” “Birth”
• Line 39: “bitter,” “Death,” “death”
• Line 42: “gods”
• Line 43: “glad”
• Lines 1-5: “'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.'”
• Lines 17-20: “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.”
• Line 4: “The,” “the weather”
• Line 5: “The very dead”
• Line 6: “And,” “camels,” “sore,” “refractory”
• Line 9: “The summer palaces,” “the terraces”
• Line 10: “the silken,” “bringing sherbet”
• Line 11: “Then,” “men,” “grumbling”
• Line 12: “running,” “liquor,” “women”
• Line 13: “n,” “ight-fires”
• Line 15: “high prices”
• Line 16: “time”
• Line 18: “Sleeping in”
• Line 19: “With,” “singing in,” “saying”
• Line 20: “this,” “all folly”
• Line 22: “below,” “snow,” “smelling,” “vegetation”
• Line 23: “stream,” “beating”
• Line 24: “three trees,” “low”
• Line 25: “And an,” “ old,” “meadow”
• Line 26: “vine”
• Line 27: “dicing”
• Line 28: “wine”
• Line 29: “no information,” “so”
• Line 30: “too soon”
• Line 31: “place,” “you,” “say”
• Line 41: “ease”
• Line 42: “people”
• Line 3: “journey, and”
• Line 6: “galled, sore-footed, refractory”
• Line 9: “slopes, the”
• Line 12: “away, and”
• Line 13: “out, and”
• Line 19: “ears, saying”
• Line 22: “Wet, below,” “line, smelling”
• Line 29: “information, and”
• Line 30: “evening, not”
• Line 31: “place; it”
• Line 32: “ago, I”
• Line 33: “again, but”
• Line 35: “This: were”
• Line 36: “Death? There”
• Line 37: “doubt. I”
• Line 38: “different; this”
• Line 39: “us, like Death, our”
• Line 40: “places, these”
• Line 41: “here, in”
• Line 2: “Just,” “ worst”
• Line 4: “ways deep,” “the weather sharp,”
• Line 7: “Lying down in,” “melting snow”
• Line 8: “There were,” “ times ,” “we regretted”
• Lines 9-10: “The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces, / And the silken girls bringing sherbet.”
• Lines 11-12: “Then the camel men cursing and grumbling / and running away, and wanting their liquor and women,”
• Line 13: “night,” “-fires,” “out,” “shelters”
• Line 14: “cities hostile,” “towns”
• Line 15: “villages dirty ,” “high,” “ prices”
• Line 16: “hard,” “had”
• Line 17: “travel all”
• Line 18: “Sleeping in snatches”
• Line 19: “With the voices singing,” “our ears, saying”
• Line 20: “That this was all folly”
• Lines 21-25: “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.”
• Line 32: “All,” “long”
• Lines 33-35: “set down / This set down / This”
• Line 35: “were we led all,” “way”
• Line 37: “evidence,” “doubt,” “death”
• Line 38: “different,” “Birth”
• Line 39: “Hard,” “bitter,” “Death,” “death”
• Line 42: “alien people,” “gods”
• Line 43: “glad,” “death”

Polysyndeton

• Line 11: “and”
• Line 12: “and,” “and,” “and”
• Line 13: “And,” “and”
• Line 14: “And,” “and”
• Line 15: “And,” “and”
• Line 23: “and”
• Line 24: “And”
• Line 25: “And”
• Line 3: “journey,” “journey”
• Line 36: “Birth or Death,” “Birth”
• Line 37: “ birth and death,”
• Line 38: “Birth”
• Line 39: “ Death, our death”
• Line 43: “death”

Rhetorical Question

• Lines 35-36: “were we led all that way for / Birth or Death?”
• Lines 4-5: “The ways deep and the weather sharp, / The very dead of winter.'”
• Lines 11-16: “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.”
• Line 22: “Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;”
• Lines 24-25: “And three trees on the low sky, / And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.”

“Journey of the Magi” Vocabulary

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

• The Old Dispensation
• (Location in poem: )

Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Journey of the Magi”

Rhyme scheme, “journey of the magi” speaker, “journey of the magi” setting, literary and historical context of “journey of the magi”, more “journey of the magi” resources, external resources.

Eliot's Reading — The poem read by its author. 

Lancelot Andrewes's Sermon — The 1622 Christmas sermon of the British bishop Lancelot Andrewes, which Eliot adapted for the poem's opening. 

A Documentary on the Poet — A BBC production about Eliot's life and work. 

Eliot and Christianity — An article exploring Eliot's relationship with his religion.

More Poems and Eliot's Biography — A valuable resource on Eliot's life and work from the Poetry Foundation.  

LitCharts on Other Poems by T. S. Eliot

Four Quartets: Burnt Norton

La Figlia Che Piange

Morning at the Window

Portrait of a Lady

Rhapsody on a Windy Night

The Hollow Men

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

The Waste Land

Ask LitCharts AI: The answer to your questions

A Short Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi’

A critical reading of a classic Christmas poem – analysed by Dr Oliver Tearle

‘Journey of the Magi’ by T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) was the first of a series of poems written by the poet for his employer, the publisher Faber and Faber, composed for special booklets or greetings cards which were issued in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Eliot claimed he wrote ‘Journey of the Magi’ in 1927, on a single day, one Sunday after church.

You can read the poem here . Below we offer some notes towards an analysis of this difficult and elusive poem, with particular focus on its meaning and imagery.

‘Journey of the Magi’: background context

‘Journey of the Magi’ is told from the perspective of one of the Magi (commonly known as the ‘Three Wise Men’, though the Bible makes no mention of their number or gender) visiting the infant Christ. The poem examines the implications that the advent of Christ had for the other religions of the time, chiefly the Zoroastrianism of the Magi themselves.

Eliot converted to Christianity in 1927 , the same year he wrote ‘Journey of the Magi’, so this is an apt poem for him to have written shortly after his acceptance into the Church of England.

According to Eliot’s second wife, Valerie, he wrote the poem very quickly: ‘I had been thinking about it in church,’ he told her years later, ‘and when I got home I opened a half-bottle of Booth’s Gin, poured myself a drink, and began to write. By lunchtime, the poem, and the half-bottle of gin, were both finished.’

The title of the poem is significant, not least Eliot’s use of the word ‘Magi’: think about its very foreignness and its ambiguity (the term originally denoted Persian Zoroastrian priests, but had come to carry the more general meaning of ‘astrologers’ – or, if you like, magicians).

This foreign and alien quality is obviously related to what the poem is about: namely, one group of people becoming alienated by the coming of another group, the people who will, in time, follow the new religion of Christianity which will lead to the death of the religions the Magi, or astrologers, follow.

The Magi are like the ‘hollow men’ of Eliot’s poem of that title from two years before: together, they find they are alienated from the rest of the world, in some sort of between-existence or limbo (because the world is in a transition between their old Zoroastrian faith and the new, emerging faith of Christianity which will supersede it).

‘Journey of the Magi’: summary

The speaker, one of the Magi, talks about the difficulties encountered by the Magi during the course of their journey to see the infant Christ.

It is unconventional to focus on the details of the journey: their longing for home (and for the ‘silken girls’ bringing the sweet drink known as ‘sherbet’), their doubts about the point of the journey they’re undertaking, the unfriendly people in the villages where they stop over for the night, and so on.

Eventually, the Magi arrive at the place where the infant Christ is to be found. The poem ends with the poem’s speaker reflecting on the journey years later, saying that if he had the chance he would do it again, but he would add that we remains unsure about the precise significance of the journey and what they found when they arrived.

Was it the birth of a new world (Christianity) or the death of an old one (i.e. the Magi’s own world)? The speaker then reveals that, since he returned home following his visit to see the infant Christ, he and his peers have felt uneasy living among his people, who now seem to be ‘an alien people clutching their gods’ (in contrast to the worshippers of the newly arrived Jesus, who worship one god only, in the form of the Messiah).

The speaker ends by telling us that he is resigned to die now, glad of ‘another death’ (his own) to complement the death of his cultural and religious beliefs, which have been destroyed by his witnessing the baby Jesus.

‘Journey of the Magi’: analysis

There are several things which are odd about Eliot’s poem.

First, for a poem titled ‘Journey of the Magi’, there is no mention of the star which – the Gospels and a million children’s nativity plays tell us – guided the Magi to the spot where Christ lay in a manger.

Second, the actual nativity scene itself is elided from the narrative: the Magi travel to the place where Christ is to be found, locate it, and then suddenly the speaker of the poem is looking back on the journey years later as an old man.

Jesus himself is absent from the poem. Is this because this part of the story is familiar to us, but the Magi themselves are not – or specifically, how the Magi would have felt about seeing their deeply-held beliefs cast into doubt by this new Messiah? Yet surely one way to convince us of the impact of this new-born deity on the lives of these Persian astrologers would have been to show us how they reacted when faced with the baby Christ.

There are several possible reasons why Eliot would have chosen to leave Jesus out of the poem, but they all raise additional questions.

Note also how the imagery foreshadows Christ’s later life and crucifixion: the three trees suggesting Christ’s crucifixion, between two thieves on the mountain; the vine, to which Jesus will liken himself; the pieces of silver foreshadowing the thirty pieces of silver Judas Iscariot will receive for betraying him; the wine-skins foreshadowing the wine that Jesus would beseech his disciples to drink in memory of him at the Last Supper.

These details are significant not least because the speaker is a priest or astrologer, someone who is trained to look for significance in the things around him, to read and interpret signs as symbols or omens. But he fails to pick up on what they foreshadow; we, however, living in a Christian (or even a post-Christian) society, can read their significance. At the end, the speaker is left feeling jaded and lost by the advent of Christ: he wonders whether Christ’s birth has been a good thing, since his arrival in the world signalled the death of his religion and the religion of his people. Now, he and his fellow Magi are world-weary and welcome the end.

‘Journey of the Magi’ is partly about belonging, about social, tribal, and religious belonging: the speaker of the poem reflects sadly that the coming of Christ has rendered his own gods and his own tribe effete, displaced, destined to be overtaken by the advent of Christ – and, with him, Christianity.

It is tempting to see the poem – written in the year Eliot converted to Anglo-Catholicism – as a metaphor for Eliot’s own feelings concerning secularism and the Christian religion, Christianity having itself been rendered effete in the face of Darwin, modern physics, and secular philosophy. The poem, about a people’s conversion from one religion to another, is equally bound up with Eliot’s own conversion.

However, a more nuanced reading invites us to see the poem as an account of the ways in which every religious and ethnic identity is in some sense threatened, at some time or in some place, by other, more dominant groups and identities. A possible allusion to Othello’s ‘Set you down this’ (his dying words in Shakespeare’s play) points up the religious and ethnic differences which underlie the poem’s setting: Othello, like Eliot, had converted to Christianity, since he was a Muslim moor who converted when he joined the Christian world of Venice.

(It should be noted, though, that there is an alternative source for these lines in Eliot’s poem: in one of his sermons, Lancelot Andrewes writes, ‘Secondly, set down this’. As with many allusions in Eliot’s poetry, there are several possible sources which Eliot may be calling into play.)

The poem, then, is not just about religious identity but about broader issues of ethnic and cultural identity, too. Note how the poem doesn’t mention Christ’s name anywhere, or that the infant they are travelling to see is Jesus: it doesn’t need to be said. Then recall the foreignness of ‘Magi’ in that title.

The Magi are already ‘other’, the alien ones or outsiders: when the speaker tells us at the end that they returned to ‘our places, these Kingdoms’, it is tempting to see the poem as in some sense a development of ‘The Hollow Men’, which was also about a group of men feeling lost and empty in a ‘kingdom’ where they appear to long for death.

It is undoubtedly this multifaceted quality to the poem which helped it to become one of the nation’s favourite poems in 1996 (it was no. 44 on the list – one higher than the childhood favourite by Edward Lear, ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ ).

‘Journey of the Magi’ is a more accessible poem than some of T. S. Eliot’s other work, yet it remains a challenging piece of poetry in many ways. It is only through analysing some of its images and more curious details that we can begin to appreciate it at a deeper level.

Continue to explore Eliot’s poetry with our analysis of his great religious poem, Ash-Wednesday , our introduction to his suite of religious poems  Four Quartets ,  and our discussion of his early modernist masterpiece, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ .

Image: Journey of the Magi, mosaic, Basilica Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna, ca. 6th c. , Wikimedia Commons.

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11 thoughts on “A Short Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi’”

What a fabulous analysis of one of my favourite poems. I always read it with a lump in my throat… the sense of despair at having outlived his sense of rightness about his own culture and religion always seems desperately sad to me. Thank you, also, for teasing out some of the more problematical aspects of this nuanced and layered poem:).

Thank you – very glad you found the analysis useful and of interest. The most poignant part for me has to be the speaker’s failure to see the significance of those symbols which foreshadow Jesus’ later life. He’s spent his whole life interpreting signs, and yet these point to a future which he will never know. A terrific poem :)

Yes! You’re right – and that aspect of the poem had never occurred to me before… which, as you say, just adds to the sense of sadness.

I had an LP of Modern Poets and this was one featured – possibly with John Gielgud reading it!

I bet it sounded wonderful, it is a lovely poem to read aloud…

Reblogged this on Manolis .

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Surely the lack of reference to Christ’s birth, the star etc (what you call elision) is due to the fact that Eliot wants to concentrate not on the event (which we should all know about, or can find out about) but on its effect on the Magi? I assume that’s why the title is “The journey (i.e. inner) of the Magi”

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Home › Analysis of T.S. Eliot’s Journey of the Magi

Analysis of T.S. Eliot’s Journey of the Magi

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 4, 2020 • ( 0 )

This poem (1927), the first of Eliot’s contributions to the Ariel series, is, along with “A Song for Simeon,” certainly far easier to place within the immediate context of the Christmas season that inspires it than his later contributions might seem to be. Eliot’s title would quickly make anyone with even the most general and secular awareness of the popular associations connected with Christmas mindful of the three wise men, or magi. Celebrated in song and image, they constitute an integral part of the lore of the Christmas story to this day. The three magi, history would have it, were pagan priests from the East, most likely adepts in astrology from the environs of Persia, who, on the basis of their observations of the stars, traveled westward, guided by the so-called Star of Bethlehem, to the “place where Jesus lay.” Tradition would further have it that they had become convinced by the astrological charts that they had cast that a great king was about to be born, one whose birth, life, and death would usher in a new age.

The Journey of the Magi, Illustrated Vita Christi, c.1190-1200

In his poem, Eliot focuses on the trials of the magi’s journey to the stable in Bethlehem and on the hope that they placed in the miraculous birth that they had traveled so far to witness, as well as on the effect that witnessing such an event had subsequently had on them. Rather than telling their story, however, Eliot, in keeping with his use of the dramatic mask that goes back as far at least as to characterizations such as J. Alfred Prufrock, imagines himself to be one of the magi many years later, telling his story apparently to a scribe so that there will be preserved a written record of it. It is a clever literary device, one that such prominent 19th-century poets as Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning had already used to great advantage. By pretending to be great literary or historical figures such as the Greek hero Ulysses or the Renaissance painter Andrea del Sarto in dramatic monologues that sought to reveal the psychology of character as much as the ruminations of theme, they were able to explore a wider range of human experience than any lyric poet can typically undergo in a lifetime and yet still use that most powerful rhetorical device, the authority of the first-person singular voice, the “I” of firsthand experience and eyewitness accounts. Utilizing the opportunities for modulating voice and poetic mask through the medium of these dramatic monologues to which those two poets had thereby reintroduced literary audiences, Eliot’s contemporary poet and good friend, the fellow American expatriate Ezra Pound, had earlier done something similar to what Eliot does with the magi with another biblical character in “The Ballad of the Goodly Fere” (1909). In that poem, the imagined speaker, Simon the Zealot, is permitted to “come to life,” as it were, to give a first-person account of Christ’s Crucifixion.

In every case, the aim of the poet using this form is to make the tired but true sound refreshingly new by giving it the characteristics of living speech caught as if in the act of being spoken. In Pound’s poem, for example, despite the artificial note struck by the pronounced rhythm and rhyme scheme required of the traditional ballad form, Simon speaks in something of a Cockney accent, making him sound like a contemporary working-class bloke rather than a high-toned Christian preacher.

The dramatic monologue was hardly a new device in Eliot’s poetic repertoire, of course. He had already expanded that form’s potential in such works as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Gerontion,” and “The Hollow Men,” to name several outstanding examples, not to mention The Waste Land , in which he set new and perhaps permanent standards for the manipulation of persona and voice as a mode of poetic discourse. But somewhat like Tennyson, whose dramatic monologues can strike readers as elaborate contrivances for all their poetic power, Eliot tended to make the form more of a poetic than a purely dramatic exercise. Prufrock might sound as if he is speaking his thoughts and feelings, for example, but they are freely combined with purely literary elements, and the entire mix is then mangled into the fragmentary by his emotional ups and downs so that any resemblance to recorded speech is purposefully blurred if not obliterated.

In the Ariel poems in general and in “Journey of the Magi” in particular, Eliot exceeds the models of those two other masters of the form and accomplishes a poetry closer in its perfection as a dramatic monologue to the considerable achievements of Robert Browning. He does so in the powerful sense of audience that he creates. The reader is made witness—only an auditory one, it is true, but a real one nevertheless—to one of the magi as he, ruminating here, reflecting there, now regretting, now rejoicing, bears witness to the events of that momentous journey, all for the sake of the invisible and silent scribe.

Note, for example, that although no specific passage of time since the journey has taken place is mentioned, it is not difficult to catch in the speaker’s tone the sense that quite some time has passed since that eventful winter’s night when they came upon the scene in Bethlehem. This is not a man still caught up in the excitement, confusions, and exhaustion of the moment, nor is he someone who has just recently returned home from an arduous trip who is sharing both his thoughts on what it was like and his relief that it is now over. Rather there is a weariness concealed in his account, a measure of helpless disappointment akin somewhat, perhaps, to the overall fatigue that invades the musings of the old man/speaker of “Gerontion.”

And yet there is a tone of self-importance as well, a sort of “I was there, let me tell you” puffery, as if Eliot wishes to leave the impression, which is always aesthetically more effective than any direct treatment of setting or subject matter, that this is an I-knew-him-when sort of summation that the speaker is making, coming long after the baby he sought on that long ago journey had matured into not the king that they had imagined that they would 276 “Journey of the Magi” find but the sacrificial victim whose birth, life, and death had nevertheless redeemed and transformed human history in ways that no one, not even these fabled wise men, could ever have anticipated. The dramatic monologue is the perfect instrument for creating ironic tensions between what the fictional speaker thinks he is saying and what the poet wants his own readers to hear. Surely, Eliot’s magus is, these many years later, less impressed with the event and more full of himself than someone who had come that close to miracle has any right to be, and to a great measure, that is the effect that Eliot is aiming to achieve.

Even now, child of the old dispensation that he self-confessedly is, Eliot’s speaker can only muse on the event with a vague appreciation for but even vaguer understanding of the changes that that birth have subsequently wrought upon him and his world. The magus begins his recollection by recalling the coldness of the journey, and to give that recollection its antique quality as if it comes not just from an earlier time but from another age, Eliot quotes virtually verbatim (and even uses quotation marks as if to underscore this point) the 300-year-old words of the 17th-century English cleric Sir Lancelot Andrewes, a contemporary and fellow word stylist of the metaphysical poet JOHN DONNE. In the passage from the Andrewes sermon that Eliot employs to set the scene and tone for his own speaker’s account, Andrewes comments on the Nativity and on how awful it was for Joseph and Mary to undertake the journey to Bethlehem. “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 in,” he commences. The only real alteration that Eliot makes in Andrewes’s original prose, indeed, is to change a third-person plural verb, they, to the first person plural, we, in keeping with the fiction that his own poem is a first-person telling of the episode.

For those who might recognize Eliot’s original source, it is as if the presence of the holy family has infiltrated the text to begin with, lurking in the corners of the reader’s own experience of the poem as it continues. This is, after all, a poem focusing on the paradoxical contrasts that the birth of Christ and his life’s mission will force on the religious imagination that will emerge from Christianity. The light of the world comes at the darkest time of the year. The king of the world is born amid conditions associated with the most abject poverty. The fire of God’s love comes at a time of bitter cold. Eliot allows the speaker’s remembrances to reflect these sharp contrasts, as he thinks of the summery life that he had left behind to make the journey, with its “summer palaces on slopes” and “silken girls bringing sherbet,” whereas all about them now, instead, is a barren winter landscape, inhabited by uncouth ruffians, an inhospitable and alien environment that seems to mock them with the nagging feeling that the perilous journey that they have undertaken is little more than “all folly.”

Having painted such a bleak scene of doubt and desperation, the speaker thus manages to surprise the reader all the more with the sudden burst of vitality with which the second stanza opens. As if it is resplendent of the hope for new life that is itself embodied in Christ, the speaker reports that they reached “at dawn . . . a temperate valley, / . . . smelling of vegetation.” This scene provides what Eliot would call an objective correlative for the spark of a rebirth, allowing Eliot to share with his contemporary readers a glimpse of the potential contained in this particular birth that his speaker could not even begin to imagine, the Earth’s resurrection into grace that Christ’s own birth foreshadows for the human spirit. However, as if to emphasize that the journey from this miraculous moment to the final redemption of humankind is a far longer and more arduous journey than any that the magi may ever have undertaken, as well as one more fraught with the defects of human folly than theirs, the dark of winter encroaches again in a flood of foreshadowing images and blots out that refreshing scene with which the second stanza had opened in its momentary flash of new life and, with it, hope.

If the sought-for birth truly were daybreak for a new epoch of humanity, then upon that still fragile hope, at this moment nothing more than a newborn infant, the darkness of this world drops again, as W. B. Yeats would put it, in the image of “three trees on the low sky.” They cast the long shadow of Christ’s death on a cross, a thief crucified to each side, backward over the pastoral valley of his birth, thus hardly permitting the speaker, or the reader, so much as a moment’s respite from the fact that heaven has not yet arrived on Earth, only its king. While it is clear that the speaker could not recognize the special significance of this and other details that follow the description of the pleasant valley setting, these images of the coming catastrophe of Christ’s Crucifixion muddy the scene and darken even the relatively ignorant speaker’s mood and tone. Eliot is also still employing the dramatic irony that he had used earlier; the poem is addressed to a contemporary Christian audience, after all, one that would definitely get the message that the first Christmas will end in the Passion of the Christ.

In the poem, at least, the darkness does not lift. Employing techniques similar to contemporary films, in which a juxtaposed image comments on a scene but is not otherwise related to it in content, Eliot now allows a horse to careen across the landscape, suggesting a natural universe out of control and hovering on the edge of chaos, and then there is a tavern and men playing dice for silver, bringing to mind the boisterous, drunken Roman soldiers who would later gamble for Christ’s garments at the foot of the cross, and Judas, too, who betrayed him for 30 pieces of silver. The speaker continues his memoir, totally unaware of the tragedy that he is seeing foretold, and concludes, pedantically, that they finally arrived at their destination, “[f]inding the place . . . (you may say) satisfactory.”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY

The understatement at first astounds and then renders itself perfectly understandable. For all of their acquaintance with mystery, its human dimensions, Eliot offers the suggestion that the magi could not possibly have understood the profundities of the unfolding mystery that they were there to witness in its initial manifestation. But then Eliot has his speaker surprise the reader by expressing at least the inkling of some awareness that, even when counted among miraculous things, this was no ordinary birth and that something far more than merely extraordinary had entered the world and, through it, human history. The speaker seems to know, or at the very least intuit, that his age and his kind, and all the wisdom of his world, is coming to an end and that this birth is the signal of their death. “[W]ere we led all that way for / Birth or Death?” he wonders, entertaining the paradox of the contradictions that such a blessing portends. Such a birth brings with it renewal, but renewal requires the removal of all those things that are now to be replaced. His is “the old dispensation,” a world that for the speaker still exists but that for Eliot and his readers is by now something even less than a relic—all that which was born too soon and died too early.

The speaker confesses that his long-ago experience has forever unsettled his life; he is “no longer at ease here” in his familiar surroundings, but to what purpose he neither puzzles out nor supposes. Like Eliot’s hollow men, he appears to have seen the light but is unable either to recognize its source or to follow it, so he shall die in the wilderness that, for Eliot, is a world without a coherent belief in a singular creation that serves a singular purpose. For all his wisdom, the speaker’s tragedy is to have come that close to mystery and majesty without having grasped its significance for him and him alone, a state of affairs whose continuing implications could not have been lost on a contemporary reader, Eliot among them.

Christ said to Nicodemus that to be saved he must be reborn, and Eliot closes the poem by seeming to play on this cryptic injunction. “I should be glad of another death,” the speaker says in an ironic twist on the notion of a spiritual rebirth, as if for him sharing the common lot of the grave would have been a better fate than to have been fated to glimpse those many years before in that desert birth the unsettling truth that his age was coming to an end along with all else that he and his hold dear—as if, for him, to gain some inkling that there is something better and greater can be worse than to know nothing at all. Eliot’s speaker seems to share the plea of the speaker in Matthew Arnold’s “Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse” (1854), who begs the harbingers of a new age that he, the speaker, knows he will not live to see to “leave our desert to its peace.”

The allusion to Othello’s closing speech in Shakespeare’s great tragedy that comes when Eliot’s speaker commands the scribe to “set down / This” has been often noted, but what Eliot has to say of that moment in the play Othello may cast some further light on what the reader ought to make of the speaker of the Eliot poem. When, just before stabbing himself to death, Othello defends himself by recalling the services that he has done Venice and makes a similar command, “Set you down this,” to the Venetians who stand about him, thunderstruck at the terrible deeds of death and violence that they have just witnessed, Eliot, in his essay “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca,” which was also published in 1927, writes that Othello “in making this speech is cheering himself up . . . [by] dramatizing himself rather than his environment.” In the same manner, Eliot’s magus sees this unfolding drama, whose initial moment he was privileged to witness, only in terms of its effects on him—the sort of self-centeredness that the Christian ethic encourages humanity to abhor. As Eliot would summarize this defect later in his poem “The Dry Salvages,” one might say of the speaker of “Journey of the Magi” that he “had the experience but missed the meaning.”

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Journey of the Magi

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‘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.

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.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on December 24, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

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Journey of the Magi

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Analysis: “Journey of the Magi”

The story of the three wise men who traveled from the East to worship the newborn Jesus appears in the Gospel of Matthew (Matthew 2:1-12). The Magi bring gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

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Journey of the Magi

By t.s. eliot, journey of the magi literary elements, speaker or narrator, and point of view.

In the first two stanzas of the poem, the speaker is a choral “we” of the three Magi recalling the journey to Bethlehem they undertook to witness the birth of Jesus. In the final stanza the voice shifts to the singular “I” of a Magus who evaluates the journey long after it has passed.

Form and Meter

Metaphors and similes.

Simile: “this Birth was/ Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.”

Alliteration and Assonance

Alliteration: “cold coming” “The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,/And the silken girls bringing sherbet.” “camel men cursing” “Sleeping in snatches” “at dawn we came down” “dicing for pieces of silver” “it was (you may say) satisfactory”

Assonance: “And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory, Lying down in the melting snow.”

“running away, and wanting their liquor and women,”

Dramatic irony: “this Birth was/Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death."

The Magus expected that he had traveled all that way to experience the joy of a birth. It turns out that although it was a birth, it was not joyous, but agonizing, because it was the opposite of birth: death, both of Jesus himself and of the pagan way of life. As readers in the Christian era, we know the story of Jesus' crucifixation, as well as the decline of paganism and the advent of Christianity. This creates a tension between what we know and what the Magus has to find out, leading to dramatic irony.

Situational irony: “Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.”

The reader expects the magus to be in awe at this moment, the climax of the story: the birth of Jesus. Instead, he uses the word "satisfactory," which has a very flat affect, and qualifies it with the parenthetical "(you may say)" which distances himself from even mild positivity.

Christmas poem; religious poetry

Persia, Judea, and the the desert between

Protagonist and Antagonist

Protagonist: The Magi Antagonist: Jesus Christ?

Major Conflict

The old dispensation (Pagan world of magic and sensuality) vs. the new dispensation (Christianity)

Christ’s birth, which is only alluded to.

Foreshadowing

“three trees low on the sky”

Understatement

“not a moment too soon/ Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.”

The running stream and water-mill are a Biblical allusion: in John 4:10-14, Jesus called himself the Living Water. The stream powers a mill “beating the darkness,” alluding to Jesus’ claim in John 8:12 to be the Light of the World. The “three trees low on the sky” have been interpreted variously by scholars to refer to the crucifixion of Christ with the two thieves on crosses to either side of him, or the Trinity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. The “white horse” refers to the one in Zechariah 6:5, who announces the coming of Jesus.

The Magi arrive at a tavern with “vine-leaves over the lintel,” a Biblical allusion to both the story of Passover from Exodus 12 and the notion of Christ as the “True Vine” (John 15:1, 5). The word “lintel” is rooted in the Latin word limen, which means threshold. They are on the threshold before both the entry to Bethlehem, and the moment before Christ is born, which for the Christian faithful will change the world entirely. The hands and feet in the next two lines are biblical allusions to the bartering for Christ (Matthew 26:14-16) and Jesus’ parable of the new wine (Matthew 9:17).

Metonymy and Synecdoche

Synecdoche: “Six hands...and feet”

Personification

The cities, towns, and villages These are personified to represent the hostility of the townspeople the Magi meet on their journey.

Onomatopoeia

Journey of the Magi Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Journey of the Magi is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

The journey of the magi

In the first two stanzas of the poem, the speaker is a choral “we” of the three Magi recalling the journey to Bethlehem they undertook to witness the birth of Jesus. In the final stanza the voice shifts to the singular “I” of a Magus who evaluates...

Discuss the theme of the life is a journey

What are the characteristics of the Magi in the poem?

The Magi are determined, unsure, and in the end transformed.

Study Guide for Journey of the Magi

Journey of the Magi study guide contains a biography of T.S. Eliot, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Journey of the Magi
• Journey of the Magi Summary
• Character List

Essays for Journey of the Magi

Journey of the Magi essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Journey of the Magi by T.S. Eliot.

• The Importance of Ambiguity in the Representation of Reality and Truth in "Preludes," "The Hollow Men," and "Journey of the Magi"