Journey of the Magi

By T. S. Eliot

“Journey of the Magi” is T. S. Eliot’s 1927 poem in which one of the wise men, now an old man, looks back on the winter journey to Christ’s birth and the faith it left him with. The 43-line dramatic monologue was published in August 1927 as No. 8 in Faber and Gwyer’s Ariel Poems, the same summer Eliot was baptized into the Church of England.

Our reading is that the poem is about the price of belief, not the joy of it. The Magus spends 20 lines on hardship and a single flat word, “satisfactory,” on the arrival, and he comes home a stranger among his own people.

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Summary · The Poem · Background · Analysis and Themes · Form and Technique · Notable Lines · Themes · FAQ
Glossary · In Popular Culture · Related Poems

Summary

An old man, one of the Magi, remembers the journey he made long ago to find a newborn king. He describes the bitter winter, the stubborn camels, the deserting camel drivers, and the hostile towns, until the travelers half believe the whole thing is folly. At dawn they come down into a green valley, pass a tavern, and reach the place at evening, which he calls, with odd restraint, “satisfactory.”

In the last section, he asks what the journey was for. He saw a birth, but it felt like a death, and since returning to his kingdom he has lived uneasily among people who still worship the old gods. He ends by saying he would be glad of another death.

The Poem

The poem was first published by Faber and Gwyer in August 1927 as No. 8 in the Ariel Poems.

‘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.

Background

In 1927, Geoffrey Faber, Eliot’s employer at the publishing house Faber and Gwyer, asked him to write a poem for the Ariel Poems, a series of illustrated pamphlets the firm sent to clients and friends as Christmas greetings. The series ran to 38 pamphlets by various writers between 1927 and 1931. “Journey of the Magi” appeared as No. 8 on August 25, 1927, with drawings by the American-born artist E. McKnight Kauffer.

The timing matters. On June 29, 1927, Eliot, raised a Unitarian in St. Louis, was baptized into the Church of England at Finstock in Oxfordshire, and that November he became a British subject. The poem was his first published work after the conversion, and it was followed by four more Ariel poems: “A Song for Simeon” (1928), “Animula” (1929), “Marina” (1930), and “Triumphal March” (1931). “Journey of the Magi” was later collected in Collected Poems 1909–1935 (1936).

The opening lines come almost directly from a Christmas Day sermon that Bishop Lancelot Andrewes preached before King James I in 1622, which describes the wise men’s trip in the words “A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year.” Eliot had praised Andrewes’s prose in a 1926 essay, and he sets the borrowed passage off in quotation marks. The story itself comes from the Gospel of Matthew, where wise men from the East follow a star to Bethlehem.

Analysis and Themes

Nativity poems usually build toward the manger. Eliot’s does the opposite: it lingers on the road, skips the scene everyone came for, and spends its ending on the aftermath. That shape carries the argument, which is that meeting the divine is less a moment of wonder than the start of a lifelong discomfort.

A Sermon Turned into a Complaint

Andrewes used the hard winter to praise the Magi’s zeal. Eliot keeps the bishop’s words but gives them to a traveler who is simply tired and cold. What follows is a list of grievances joined by “and”: the camels lie down in the snow, the camel men want “their liquor and women,” the night fires go out, and the villages overcharge. The speaker even misses “the silken girls bringing sherbet.” This is a pilgrim who is honest about wanting to turn back, and the voices singing “That this was all folly” sound like his own doubts.

The Arrival Gets One Line

After 30 lines of travel, the Magi find the place “not a moment too soon,” and the Magus sums it up as “(you may say) satisfactory.” There is no star, no mother and child, and no gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. The understatement is deliberate. The speaker either cannot describe what he saw or has learned that describing it misses the point, and the parenthesis sounds like a man anticipating an argument he cannot win.

The Valley Already Knows How the Story Ends

The second section looks like plain landscape, but nearly every detail points ahead to the end of Christ’s life. The “three trees on the low sky” suggest the three crosses of the Crucifixion. The old white horse recalls the rider on the white horse in Revelation. Hands “dicing for pieces of silver” merge the soldiers who gambled for Christ’s clothes with Judas’s payment, and the vine leaves over the lintel echo both the Passover doorways and Christ’s saying “I am the vine.” The Magus does not read these signs, but the reader does, so the Nativity and the Passion happen in the same valley.

A Birth That Works Like a Death

In the final section, the Magus stumbles over his own dictation (“set down / This set down / This”) before asking whether they were led “all that way for / Birth or Death?” His answer is that the Birth was “Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.” What died was his old world. He goes home to his kingdom, but its gods now look foreign to him, and he can neither return to “the old dispensation” nor fully live in the new one. His closing wish for “another death” can be read as a longing for his own end or as the Christian hope of dying to the self, and the poem lets both meanings stand. Written in the year of Eliot’s own baptism, it treats conversion as a loss that has to be lived through, not a reward.

Form and Technique

The poem has 43 lines in three verse paragraphs of 20, 11, and 12 lines. It is a dramatic monologue, spoken by an unnamed Magus to a listener who seems to be writing down his words, and it follows the story in order: the journey, the arrival, and the years after.

It is written in free verse, with no rhyme scheme and no regular meter. The lines stretch and shrink with the speaker’s mood, from long, crowded catalogs of complaint to short, winded phrases such as “Sleeping in snatches” (line 18) and “This set down” (line 34). Many lines rest on three or four heavy stresses, as in “a COLD COM-ing we HAD of it,” which gives the poem the rhythm of speech rather than song.

Eliot relies on anaphora and polysyndeton: six of the first 15 lines begin with “And,” so the hardships pile up one after another without pause. The opening five lines are set in quotation marks to mark the borrowing from Andrewes, and the capitalized “Birth” and “Death” in the final section lift those words from ordinary events into religious ones.

Notable Lines

These short passages carry the poem’s turn from complaint to crisis.

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year

Lines 1 to 2

Eliot turns Andrewes’s third-person sermon into first person, so the grand story of the wise men starts as one traveler’s grumble about the weather.

And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.

Lines 24 to 25

Two quiet images of scenery, each carrying a hint of the Crucifixion and the end of time, placed where the speaker sees nothing unusual in them.

this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

Lines 38 to 39

The poem’s central paradox. The line break after “was” makes the reader wait, and the correction from “Death” to “our death” turns a general idea into a personal cost.

I should be glad of another death.

Line 43

The last line is calm and ambiguous. It can mean the tired wish of an old man to die or the hope of a final change that will complete his conversion.

Themes

Four ideas run through the poem’s three sections.

Faith and doubt. The Magus keeps going while voices call the journey folly, and years later he still cannot say exactly what he found. Eliot presents belief as persistence through uncertainty, not as certainty.

Birth and death. The poem refuses to keep the two apart. The birth in Bethlehem already contains the Crucifixion, and the speaker’s new life requires the death of his old one.

Spiritual exile. Back home, the Magus is “no longer at ease” among “an alien people clutching their gods.” Conversion has made him a foreigner in his own kingdom, a feeling Eliot, newly baptized and newly British, may have known well.

Memory and old age. The whole poem is a recollection from “a long time ago,” and the speaker’s halting dictation shows a man still trying to understand an experience that changed him decades earlier.

Frequently Asked Questions

These are the questions readers most often ask about “Journey of the Magi.”

What is “Journey of the Magi” about?

It is about one of the three wise men remembering, in old age, the hard journey to see the infant Jesus and what that visit cost him. The birth he witnessed felt like a death, and afterward he could no longer feel at home among his own people and their old gods.

When was “Journey of the Magi” written?

T. S. Eliot wrote it in 1927, and Faber and Gwyer published it as a pamphlet on August 25, 1927. It was the first of his five Ariel poems and was later collected in Collected Poems 1909–1935 (1936).

Who is the speaker in “Journey of the Magi”?

The speaker is one of the Magi, the wise men from the East in the Gospel of Matthew, talking as an old man long after the journey. Eliot never names him, and his line “set down / This” suggests he is dictating his memories to a scribe.

How long was the journey of the Magi?

The poem never gives a distance or a number of days, only that it was “such a long journey” made in the dead of winter. The Gospel of Matthew is just as vague, saying only that the wise men came from the East.

Why did T. S. Eliot write “Journey of the Magi”?

He wrote it because Geoffrey Faber, his employer, asked him for a poem for the Ariel series of illustrated Christmas pamphlets. It came in 1927, the year Eliot was baptized into the Church of England, and many readers hear his own difficult conversion in the Magus’s voice.

Glossary

A few of the poem’s words are worth pinning down.

• galled (line 6): Rubbed sore by harness or saddle.
• refractory (line 6): Stubborn and hard to control.
• sherbet (line 10): A cool, sweet fruit drink served in the Middle East.
• temperate (line 21): Mild in climate, neither very hot nor very cold.
• lintel (line 26): The beam across the top of a doorway.
• dispensation (line 41): A religious order or system of belief; here, the pagan world before Christ.

In Popular Culture

The poem’s title, voice, and closing lines have been borrowed by a composer, a novelist, and a poet.

Benjamin Britten set the complete poem as Canticle IV: The Journey of the Magi, Op. 86, for countertenor, tenor, baritone, and piano. It was first performed on June 6, 1971, at Snape Maltings during the Aldeburgh Festival, by James Bowman, Peter Pears, and John Shirley-Quirk, with Britten at the piano.

Chinua Achebe took the title of his 1960 novel No Longer at Ease from the poem’s closing lines, which serve as its epigraph. The novel follows a young Nigerian who returns from England and, like Eliot’s Magus, no longer fits in the world he came home to.

Tony Harrison’s Gulf War poem “A Cold Coming” (1991), written in response to a photograph of a burned Iraqi soldier and first published in The Guardian, takes its title from the poem’s opening line.

Related Poems

If this poem speaks to you, these are good to read next.

• A Song for Simeon by T. S. Eliot: Eliot’s second Ariel poem, spoken by the old man who holds the infant Jesus in the temple and longs for his own release.
• The Oxen by Thomas Hardy: A Christmas Eve poem that, like Eliot’s, holds on to belief while doubting it.
• The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy: A bleak winter landscape that yields an uncertain hope.
• Ulysses by Alfred Tennyson: Another old man looking back on a great journey and restless in the home he returned to.