T.S. Eliot's The Journey of the Magi: A Study in Loss

T.S. Eliot's great poem "The Journey of the Magi" is about, obviously, the journey of the Magi, or more traditionally the "wise men," to see the baby Jesus after his birth in Bethlehem. The poem is made up of three stanzas, in a basic 'free-verse' type of style, more like prose than poetry except for the sudden stops and starts and line breaks.

The first stanza starts with a quote from another poem regarding their journey being cold and long, and then continues on to discuss it in more detail. The speaker in the poem is one of the Magi who made the journey, and in the first stanza he states that, "There were times we regretted / The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces, / And the silken girls bringing sherbet" (Eliot 1261). He says this because the going is so hard, and he feels if they hadn't known such a good life before the journey they wouldn't feel so bad now.

The second stanza completes their journey to their destination, though the speaker never mentions it by name. The entire stanza, however, is filled with biblical imagery regarding the story of Christ and His death and resurrection, such as "three trees on the low sky," and "Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver" (Eliot 1262). When the speaker describes the manger (stable) that they find the baby Jesus in, he refers to it by saying, "it was (you may say) satisfactory" (Eliot 1262).

In the last stanza the speaker stops telling the story of their journey and tells what they learned from it. He talks of the nature of birth and death and decides that though they left to see a birth, the birth of Christ, it was like a death to them because after that everything changed. The last lines state it best: "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" (Eliot 1262).

This poem is classic Eliot, and like his other works, it leaves you with the feeling that while something important has happened, something has also been lost. Another of his poems, the infamous "Preludes," provides maybe one of the best examples of this trait: "I am moved by fancies that are curled / Around these images, and cling: / The notion of some infinitely gentle / Infinitely suffering thing" (The Waste Land 20).

This quote perhaps illustrates also the feelings of the narrator of Eliot's "The Journey of the Magi," who found exactly what he meant to, and came away not with satisfaction, but a "notion" similar to that described in "Preludes."

Works Cited

Eliot, T.S. "The Journey of the Magi." The Norton Introduction to Literature. Ed. Jerome Beatty, et.al. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002.

Eliot, T.S. "Preludes." The Waste Land and Other Poems. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2005.