Journey of the Magi

At the time he published “Journey of the Magi,” Eliot was known primarily for his exploration in poetry of the decay of Western culture. He was most famous for “The Waste Land,” a poem in which people live their everyday lives without purpose or belief. Society is fragmented and sterile, without any underlying common values to support it. “The Hollow Men” (1925), as its title suggests, expresses a similar point of view. The hollow men are the spiritually dead, living ghostly, ineffective lives:

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or rats’ feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar (T. S. Eliot. “The Hollow Men.” All Poetry. 1925. Lines 5-10).

The next poem that Eliot wrote was “Journey of the Magi,” in which the Magi, whatever else they may be, are certainly not “hollow men”; they are men of purpose, determined, resolute, doubts notwithstanding. They have a role to play in the emergence of the new dispensation, the Christian era. This might seem like a sharp break with Eliot’s previous themes, and indeed that is so. However, as his biographer Peter Ackroyd points out, Eliot’s religious sensibilities had begun to develop some years earlier, in 1923, when he met William Force Stead, an American poet who was living in England and had been ordained in the Church of England. Eliot was no stranger to religious thought, having studied mysticism and Buddhism in graduate school, and his conversion to the Anglican church in 1927 “was not the dramatic or unexpected reversal of interests which some have claimed it to be, but rather the culmination of a lengthy and consistent process which at least in hindsight seems inevitable” (Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot: A Life, Simon and Schuster, 1984, p. 138).

In 1926, Eliot began attending services of the Church of England; he believed he was returning to his English ancestors' religion. His 17th-century ancestor, Andrew Eliot, lived in the English village of East Coker (the village that would supply the title of one of Eliot’s later poems, the Four Quartets). Eliot was drawn to the Anglo-Catholic elements within the Church of England because he thought that in its rites and doctrines, the Church maintained the elements of religious tradition that were important to him. By this time, Eliot had come to believe that only religious faith and belief could overcome the sense of emptiness of human affairs, and his own experience of meaninglessness, chaos, and futility. He thought that religion helped a person to “train and discipline the emotions” (p. 161), which perhaps offers a clue to the character of the Magus in the poem, who does not allow his emotions to intrude on his need to complete his journey. Moreover, Eliot’s friend Stead once wrote of Eliot that “[h]e was never the man to accept life with a carefree enjoyment” (p. 137), which resembles the Magus in the poem after he returns to his own land: His spiritual journey was indeed arduous.