Journey of the Magi

Britain's greatest masterpieces

- T.S.Eliot

IN 1927, the Bloomsbury publisher Faber and Gwyer (Faber & Faber from 1929) announced a new series of booklets suitably decorated in colours and dressed in the gayest wrappers', featuring Christmas-themed poems. With artwork supplied by established and rising talents, such as Paul and John Nash, Eric Ravilious, Eric Gill and Edward McKnight Kauffer, the publisher hoped they would find a place in the Christmas gift market. Thomas Hardy, G. K. Chesterton, W.B. Yeats and Siegfried Sassoon were among those who contributed poems to the series. T. S. Eliot, who had joined Faber two years earlier as a literary editor, having left his City job in Lloyds Bank's Colonial and Foreign Department, was to write six of what became known as The Ariel Poems. The first of these was Journey of the Magi.

The publication of the poem at Christmas 1927 came at a timely moment in Eliot's life, after his reception into the Church of England earlier that year. Eliot later explained that the poem asked the question: How fully was the Truth revealed to those who were inspired to recognise Our Lord so soon after the Nativity?'

The poem was framed around the Biblical journey of the three kings, or wise men, who came from the East to pay homage to the baby Jesus in Bethlehem. The power of the verse lay in the way Eliot turned it into a first-person narrative by one of the magi. Rather than a joyous pilgrimage, he described an arduous trek through the very dead of winter? With references to such a long journey', with camels galled, sore-footed', moving through cities hostile and towns unfriendly, it became a metaphor for the voyage Eliot believed the human spirit must make to experience Christ.