Journey of the Magi
Journey of the Magi | |
---|---|
by Faber and Gwyer | |
Publication date | August 1927 |
Lines | 43 |
"Journey of the Magi" is a 43-line poem written in 1927 by
In the previous year, Eliot had converted to Anglo-Catholicism and his poetry, starting with the Ariel Poems (1927–1931) and Ash Wednesday (1930), took on a decidedly religious character.[3] In the poem, Eliot retells the story of the biblical Magi who travelled to Bethlehem to visit the newborn Jesus according to the Gospel of Matthew. It is a narrative, told from the point of view of one of the magi, that expresses themes of alienation, regret and a feeling of powerlessness in a world that has changed. The poem's dramatic monologue incorporates quotations and literary allusions to works by earlier writers Lancelot Andrewes and Matthew Arnold.
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.
Writing and publication
In 1925, Eliot became a poetry editor at the London publishing firm of Faber and Gwyer, Ltd.,
Critical reviews of Eliot's poems shifted as well, with some critics asserting that Eliot's work suffered with the addition of Christian themes.
In 1927, Eliot was asked by his employer,
Faber & Gwyer, Ltd., printed the "Journey of the Magi" in a 7¼" × 4 ¾", Octavo (8vo) pamphlet "line block in black with brown and grey; casing, thin card covered with yellow laid paper."[13][15][16] The font of the cover and poem text was "Imprint" created by Gerard Meynell & J. H. Mason in 1913 for the printing trade magazine The Imprint.[16] The poem was printed on two pages, accompanied a colour images by Kauffer, and included one page of advertisements. Faber & Gwyer contracted with the Curwen Press in Plaistow to print 5,000 copies.[13] There was a limited edition of 350 copies that was printed "on Zanders' hand-made paper".[16] According to Gilmour, the edition was printed "in batches of eight."[17] A yellow cover was used for Eliot's poem after Curwen's designer Paul Nash objected for its use in the seventh Ariel pamphlet, Siegfried Sassoon's "Nativity".[17]
In 1936, Faber & Faber, the successor firm to Faber & Gwyer, collected "Journey of the Magi" and three of the other poems under the heading "Ariel Poems" for an edition of Eliot's collected poems.[2] ("Triumphal March" appears as Section 1 of "Coriolan" in the "Unfinished Poems" section.) When Faber released another series in 1954, Eliot included a sixth poem, "The Cultivation of Christmas Trees", illustrated by artist and poet David Jones,[4]: p.19 which was added to Faber's 1963 edition of his collected poems.[2] Both editions of collected poems were published in the United States by Harcourt, Brace & Company.[2]
All six poems were published together as a separate publication for the first time by Faber & Faber in 2014. This publication included the original illustrations.
Interpretation and analysis
The poem is an account of the journey from the point of view of one of the
- ". . . were we led all that way for
- Birth or Death?"
The birth of the
The poem maintains Eliot's long habit of using the
The poem has a number of symbolist elements, where an entire philosophical position is summed up by the manifestation of a single image. For example, the narrator says that on the journey they saw "three trees against a low sky"; the single image of the three trees implies the historical future (the crucifixion which is an allusion as it makes reference to a biblical term) and the spiritual truth of the future (the skies lowered and heaven opened).
See also
References
- ^ a b Eliot, T(homas). S(tearns). "Journey of the Magi" (London: Faber & Gwyer, 1927).
- ^ a b c d Eliot, T(homas). S(tearns). Collected Poems: 1909–1935. (London: Faber & Faber; New York: Harcourt Brace, 1936); and Collected Poems: 1909–1962. (London: Faber & Faber; New York: Harcourt Brace, 1963).
- ^ a b c Timmerman, John H. T. S. Eliot’s Ariel Poems: The Poetics of Recovery. (Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: Bucknell University Press, 1994), 117–123.
- ^ a b c d e Murphy, Russell Elliott. Critical Companion to T. S. Eliot: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work. (New York: Facts on File/InfoBase Publishing, 2007).
- ^ Rainey, Lawrence S. (editor) The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot's Contemporary Prose (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 9ff.
- ^ a b Gordon, Lyndell. T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life. (London: Vintage, 1998).
- ^ Eliot, T. S. Preface to For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order. (London: Faber and Faber, 1929). The specific quote is: "The general point of view [of the essays] may be described as classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic [sic] in religion."
- ^ Staff. Books: Royalist, Classicist, Anglo-Catholic (a review of 1936 Harcourt, Brace edition of Eliot's Collected Poems: 1909–1935) in Time Magazine (25 May 1936). Retrieved 24 October 2013.
- ^ Kirk, Russell. Eliot and His Age: T. S. Eliot's Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century. (Wilmington: Isi Books, 2008), 240. Kirk, in his discussion, mentions the critique of George Orwell as one of the more prominent positions on Eliot's development. Orwell said: "It is clear that something has departed, some kind of current has been switched off, the later verse does not contain the earlier, even if it is claimed as an improvement upon it [...] He does not really feel his faith, but merely assents to it for complex reasons. It does not in itself give him any fresh literary impulse."
- ^ Zabel, Morton D. "T. S. Eliot in Mid-Career," in Poetry (September 1931): 36:330–337.
- ^ Symes, Gordon. "T. S. Eliot and Old Age", in Fortnightly 169(3) (March 1951): 186–93.
- ^ Stead, Christian. The New Poetic: Yeats to Eliot, (Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, 1969), passim.
- ^ a b c Gallup, Donald. "A9a. The Journey of the Magi" in T. S. Eliot: A Bibliography. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969), 34, passim.
- ^ Moody, A. David. Thomas Stearns Eliot: Poet. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 114.
- ^ Phillips, Robin. "Notes on Ariel Poems" in Oliver Simon at the Curwen Press: a bibliographic handlist of their book production from 1919 to 1955. (Plaistow: Curwen Press, 1963). Retrieved 12 November 2013.
- ^ a b c Phillips, Robin. 1927 Jzf8 limited edition and 1927 Jzf8a ordinary edition in Oliver Simon at the Curwen Press: a bibliographic handlist of their book production from 1919 to 1955. (Plaistow: Curwen Press, 1963). Retrieved 12 November 2013.
- ^ a b Gilmour, Pat. Artists at Curwen: A Celebration of the Gift of Artists' Prints from the Curwen Studio. (London: Tate Gallery, 1977), 47.
- ^ "Sermons of the Nativity. Preached upon Christmas-Day, 1622". Project Canterbury Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology. Retrieved 8 April 2014. Eliot changes the first person to the third person, and omits the Latin.