It starts out in the cold, at the “worst time of year,” and ends with a stab into the heart of life lived “at ease here, in the old dispensation.” Nevertheless — or perhaps precisely because of that cold beginning and hard ending — T. S. Eliot’s The Journey of the Magi is high on my list of poems to read over and over again.

Eliot wrote it in 1927, the year he converted to Christianity. He was already well established in the top ranks of American literature, having published his classics The Waste Land and The Hollow Men (“This is the way the world ends… Not with a bang, but a whimper”) earlier in that decade.

“A cold coming we had of it,” The Journey of the Magi begins, and the cold is everywhere: in the weather, in the cities and villages, even perhaps in the heart of the Magi narrating the journey, who

… regretted [leaving behind]
The summer palaces on the slope, the terraces
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.

The poem fairly reeks of regret, until the descent into the “temperate valley;” but even when they reach their long-sought destination there is hesitation: “it was (you might say) satisfactory.”

Which is when the real regret begins.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.

That’s the tame part of the final stanza. The rest I leave for you to experience as it should be, in the poem’s entire context. Be prepared.

Eliot leaves a lot left unsaid. How much was this king changed by his encounter with the Child he had journeyed to see? It’s hard to say. I’d like to think there’s a hint of his conversion there, in the way he assesses his own subjects, who had become to him “an alien people clutching their gods.”

And what is this “Death, our death” of which he speaks? The death of the King’s old idolatrous ways? Probably that, yes, and more. But was there new birth in his heart to go with it? On this Eliot is coy. The Magi “had seen birth and death, But had thought they were different.” We have room to wonder how different they were in this King’s life. It was not just his journey that was hard for him.

What cannot be doubted is that his world had been completely upended, and that this had happened through the Birth of the Child whose nativity we celebrate this week; the One who is still turning hearts upside-down — or (more accurately) upside-right: no longer at ease in the old dispensation.

The Journey Of The Magi

‘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, sorefooted, 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 arriving at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding 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 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.