Waking before light, shaking off a nightmare–I wanted to write and post this poem by T. S. Eliot, The Journey of The Magi. Life, your life and my life, can be thought of as a journey.  If I dare to pay attention the journey is troubled, fraught with hazard. The friction of living can be severe.

There is the diagnosis that you did not see coming, and the months of disabling treatment. There is the business relationship, important, necessary that your instinct tells you is shaky, subject to matters you have no control over. Finally there is news that the government, at least part of it has been shut down. The president insists on spending five billion dollars to build a wall in order to satisfy his base of supporters. Never mind that walls are a hallmark of dictatorships. So we are extorted by a government shut-down for money to build his wall.

Before reading the poem The Journey of The Magi by T. S. Eliot I suggest reading the Gospel of Matthew chapter 2 for the account of the visit of the three wise men to Bethlehem. This is the Christmas story according to Matthew. Note with Eliot’s reframing of the story, the journey means that I must leave my native habitat, the home base of my comfort zone. With departure everything changes. Change is the order of the day. The challenge of adapting is formidable. “Ways deep and weather sharp,”–challenge of weather extremes, of finding shelter on the road. “The villages dirty and charging high prices.” Notice the central role of the five senses in the poem. Life is sensual experience. The subtext is like a shadow over the story. “And three trees on the low sky.” Then a few lines later, “Six hands…dicing for pieces of silver.” I particularly like, “But there was no information, and so we continued.”
Enjoy!

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The Journey of The Magi

by T.S. Eliot

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a 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 in 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.

*The highlighted text is my own