Death in Life at Christmas: T. S. Eliot's "Journey of the Magi"

One of t. s. eliot's most recognized poems is "Journey of the Magi."¹ The poem first appeared inside a Christmas card. Richard de la Mare, who served with Eliot as director for the publishing house Faber & Faber, had the entrepreneurial idea of sending Christmas cards to those who had business with the press. In the spirit of Shakespeare, the series was called "Ariel Poems." The inside page of the card contained an unpublished Christmas-related poem from a contemporary poet, and the exterior was accompanied by an illustration from a noted contemporary artist. Between 1927 and 1931 the press released thirty-eight "Ariel Poems" by figures such as Thomas Hardy, G. K. Chesterton, Siegfried Sassoon, W. B. Yeats, and D. H. Lawrence. T. S. Eliot wrote five of the poems during these years, of which four were matched with illustrations by the avant-garde American poster artist, Edward McKnight Kauffer. A 1936 collection of Eliot's poetry for Faber & Faber included his contributions to the cards under the heading "Ariel Poems."

Eliot's "Ariel Poems," while written for Christmas cards, are a far cry from the maudlin warm and fuzzy Hallmark cards typical of the season. As in most of Eliot's poetry, a deep melancholy pervades

The Journey of The Magi

by T. S. Eliot'A cold coming we had of it,Just the worst time of the yearFor a journey, and such a long journey:The ways deep and the weather sharp,The very dead of winter.'And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory,Lying down in the melting snow.There were times we regrettedThe summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,And the silken girls bringing sherbet.Then the camel men cursing and grumblingand 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 unfriendlyAnd 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, sayingThat 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 continuedAnd arrived at evening, not a moment too soonFinding the place; it was (you might say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,And I would do it again, but set downThis set downThis: were we led all that way forBirth or Death? There was a Birth, certainlyWe had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,But had thought they were different; this Birth wasHard 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.

T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991). This poem has been shared here under fair use guidelines provided by The Poetry Foundation.

the lines. Unfulfilled longing and a searing awareness that this life is a penultimate season of ennui mark the "Ariel Poems." Eliot's casting of Christmas is not typical of what comes to mind when we think of Christmas. Nevertheless, Eliot points his readers toward an essential aspect of Christmas not often considered.

The joy of Christmas is the celebration of God entering into human life, the feast commemorating the moment when the immortal becomes mortal and eternal life breaks into the cycle of temporal existence. For Eliot...