For the Friday after Epiphany, traditionally associated with the arrival of the wise men, whoever they were and however numerous (who says there were three?), at Bethlehem, a mighty poem about the practical and emotional realities of the journey. As I explained in a post a few days ago, T S Eliot's masterpiece was inspired by a sermon of Launcelot Andrews' - and for me, it also has a particular, personal resonance. At school, three of us were asked to read three Christmas poems at the annual carol concert - Hardy's The Oxen, Betjeman's Christmas ("that most tremendous tale of all"), and Journey of the Magi. At the time, I was very anti modern poetry of any sort, and would happily have read the Betjeman, and been OK with the Hardy - but of course, I was allocated the Eliot! I read it with great passion and violence, hamming it up dreadfully no doubt. And when the evening came, one of my colleagues was ill, and I did the Hardy as well (Mr Cornflower may even remember it?). Since then, of course, my views have changed, and while I can enjoy Hardy's or Betjeman's poetry on occasion, I am long a convert to the view that Eliot is the most significant poet in English ... well, since when? Certainly of the last hundred years, and perhaps since the beginning of the eighteenth century?
You may not agree with that particular judgement, but here is a mighty poem in anybody's language. It starts with a quotation from Lancelot Andrews' 1620 Christmas sermon, and its language, too, is much influenced by Andrewes. It is harsh and bitter in places, but it is also very moving - and the language is superb. This was published in Ariel Poems, in 1927, as Eliot moved steadily towards the religious belief, specifically the strongly ritualistic Anglo-Catholicism, of the rest of his life. I hope you find something powerful and determined in T S Eliot's Journey of the Magi, and I wish you all well on your individual journeys in 2009.
‘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.
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 in 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 imformation, 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.