The Journey of the Magi
‘A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For the 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.
– T. S. Eliot
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2 comments
James Hopper says:
Jan 13, 2013
Another excellent one:
Twelfth Night
All night I thought on those wise men who took
A midnight leave of towers and came peering
Pyramidally down to the dark guards
And stared apart, each with a mad, hid look
Twitching his mummied beard
while the night swords
Conferred and chains fell and the unwieldy bar
Slid and swung back
then wandered out to name
The living demon of an unnamed star.
All night I followed them and came at last
On a low hutch propped in an alleyway
And stretched aside
while one by one they passed
Those stilted mages mitred in stiff blue
Under the sagging beams and through the stalls.
Following through stench and misty fug I saw
And nothing were clearer in the scrupulous day
The rigid drooping of their ancient palls
Burnish with light, where on a toss of straw
Swaddled with rags, to their abashment, lay
Not the pedantic God whose name they knew
But a small child petulant with cries.
With courtesies unperturbed and slow
They laid their gifts down, unburnt scents and gold:
But gray evasions shamed their skeptic eyes
And the starved hands were suddenly boned with cold
As plucking their gorgeous skirts they shook to go.
John Peale Bishop (1892-1944)
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Repping it Out: Secular Puritans and Eschatological Fitness | Mockingbird says:
Jan 8, 2013
[...] the weather sharp…with the voices singing in our ears/saying that this was all folly’, to quote Eliot on the difficulty of religious pilgrimage. The language of a compelling vision that’s [...]