Epiphany

Sadly, the first thing Eliot's "Journey of the Magi" brings to mind is Connie Willis's short story "Epiphany," which quotes the first two lines (which are themselves a paraphrase of a passage by 17th-century divine Lancelot Andrewes) at a pivotal moment. I mean, it's a terrific story, but still. I'm not so sure that's what Eliot, Andrewes, or the magi would really want.

'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.

***

It's interesting, really; I think as much as this poem is concerned with the magi, it's also concerned with the poet's own spiritual progress, as it was published in 1927, just around the time of his conversion to Anglicanism (which was really an official acceptance of Christianity, period). This whole concept of the journey is one that would culminate in 1941-3's Little Gidding, in which he writes

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. (lines 39b-46)

He's ostensibly talking about the chapel at Little Gidding (a village that had been established in 1625 as an Anglican religious community), but it's difficult not to recall the themes of the earlier poem: the journey, the desire for verification, and the retreat from a spiritually-rich location to one that now seems spiritually barren.

Or maybe I just really, really miss majoring in English.