THE JOURNEY OF THE MAGI - TS ELIOT
THE JOURNEY OF THE MAGI - TS ELIOT
Mantegna, "Adoration of the Magi", (1500).
POOR TOM:
The Journey of the Magi is TS Eliot’s story of his conversion – a hard and bitter struggle, where he turned from an agnostic lifestyle to become a high Anglican. Then, like the soldier returning home, he found it difficult to connect with those whose values he had previously accepted without question and who had seemed to be his friends. Indeed, Virginia Woolfe was a friend (sort of), but his conversion was met with outrage by her. She wrote to her sister, Vanessa Bell in 1928: "Then I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with poor dear Tom Eliot who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic, believes in God and immortality and goes to church. I was really shocked. A corpse would seem to me more credible than he is. I mean, there's something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God."
Nice...
We, of course, would say that in his journey from atheism to the Truth, in fact, he stopped too soon and journeyed to the wrong town – he should have gone on to Rome….
“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.
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