![]() ![]() ![]() ‘Journey of the Magi’ is partly about belonging, about social, tribal, and religious belonging: the speaker of the poem reflects sadly that the coming of Christ has rendered his own gods and his own tribe effete, displaced, destined to be overtaken by the advent of Christ – and, with him, Christianity. Now, he and his fellow Magi are world-weary and welcome the end. At the end, the speaker is left feeling jaded and lost by the advent of Christ: he wonders whether Christ’s birth has been a good thing, since his arrival in the world signalled the death of his religion and the religion of his people. But he fails to pick up on what they foreshadow we, however, living in a Christian (or even a post-Christian) society, can read their significance. These details are significant not least because the speaker is a priest or astrologer, someone who is trained to look for significance in the things around him, to read and interpret signs as symbols or omens. Note also how the imagery foreshadows Christ’s later life and crucifixion: the three trees suggesting Christ’s crucifixion, between two thieves on the mountain the vine, to which Jesus will liken himself the pieces of silver foreshadowing the thirty pieces of silver Judas Iscariot will receive for betraying him the wine-skins foreshadowing the wine that Jesus would beseech his disciples to drink in memory of him at the Last Supper. There are several possible reasons why Eliot would have chosen to leave Jesus out of the poem, but they all raise additional questions. Is this because this part of the story is familiar to us, but the Magi themselves are not – or specifically, how the Magi would have felt about seeing their deeply-held beliefs cast into doubt by this new Messiah? Yet surely one way to convince us of the impact of this new-born deity on the lives of these Persian astrologers would have been to show us how they reacted when faced with the baby Christ. Second, the actual nativity scene itself is elided from the narrative: the Magi travel to the place where Christ is to be found, locate it, and then suddenly the speaker of the poem is looking back on the journey years later as an old man. There are several things which are odd about Eliot’s poem.įirst, for a poem titled ‘Journey of the Magi’, there is no mention of the star which – the Gospels and a million children’s nativity plays tell us – guided the Magi to the spot where Christ lay in a manger. ![]()
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