Reflection

品賞艾略特的英詩三智士朝聖行(T.S.Eliot's poem "Journey of the Magi" )

The poem Journey of the Magi could serve as a reflection of the poet T. S. Eliot’s literary thoughts. One section in Eliot’s representative paper Tradition and the Individual Talent says, “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. (……) You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.” Therefore, having some new meaning and a little transformation from the tradition, we may say, the old works of ancient times, is very important for Eliot’s making of poems.

This poem interacts with the ancient Biblical story, the Magi’s journey to witness the Savior, Jesus’ birth. As we can predict from his paper on literature, he must add something new in the ancient traditional story to “alter” the “existing order” “slightly” in order to show the significance of a poet. (The quoted words are from Eliot’s Tradition and the Individual Talent.) The allusions make this happen. In line 26, the Magi “came to a tavern with vine-leaves,” and vine-leaves serve as a symbol of Jesus’ holy blood, which means the Sacrifice. Another allusion can be seen in line 19-20, “With the voices singing in our ears, saying/ That this was all folly.” This provides a sound image and a comparison with Odyssey’s adventure, in which the ancient hero fought with the possession made by Siren, the beautiful evil sea spirit with nice singing voices.

Indirect language could add new meanings and new fashions in old stories. In Bible, there was a star guiding the Magi to Bethlehem. However, the poet chooses not to use the word “star” in order to distinguish his work from the ancient ones. He just uses the words “all night” in line 17 to make association of readers’ own. In the last stanza, the words “Birth” and “Death” have connotation of Christianity and Buddhism (Buddhism is a representative paganism in this poem, or maybe in Eliot’s heart). The Magus has his monologue show the comparison between Christianity and Buddhism. Eliot puts the word “another” before “death” in the last line of the poem to provoke a metaphor of Buddhism’s reincarnation. Seeing the birth of Jesus should have much impact on the Magi’s minds. Another death would be fine with the narrator, one of the Magi, to regain the ease of being a pagan in his own country, because he would not stand the pagans “clutching their gods” in line 42. Thus, Christianity is highly praised by Eliot in such a ridiculous and indirect way.

=== The Attached Text: The original poem ===

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 was 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 gong 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 lead all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I have 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.

=== Written by T.S. Eliot in 1927 ===