Is anyone up for dissecting religious poems from a Reformed perspective? I thought I'd post T.S. Eliot's "Journey of the Magi" for a start. This was written shortly after Eliot's conversion to Christianity and baptism into the Church of England. If anyone responds to the thread, I'll post some of my commentary on this one.

Journey of the Magi
T.S. Eliot

'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.

Than 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.

__________________
Evie B.
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Attending Park Street Church, Boston

"Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert." --Isaiah 43:18-19 (ESV)

Evie,

This is an excellent idea. I don't have time to offer much in the way of a thoughtful critique at the moment but when my busy schedule lightens up I hope to chip in my I spent some time studying Elliott in college and wrote a paper on The Wasteland. Later, I read Murder in the Cathedral. He is a powerful and challenging read.

BTW, I would also be interested in Reformed perspectives on some Puritan-Anglican poems that I have posted about previously here and here and here if anyone is inclined.

__________________
Andrew Myers
Husband of Jessica, Father of Jackson, Katie and Samuel
Member, Presbyterian Reformed Church of Northern Virginia
Warrenton, VA USA
Editor, The Matthew Poole Project

"Let your Morning Thoughts, and your last Evening Thoughts, be what shall become of you to all Eternity." -- Matthew Poole

T.S.Eliot is the man!

__________________
The man who is disposed to think of his sin as a great calamity, rather than as a heinous crime, is not likely either to reverence God or to respect His law. - John Kennedy, 1873
Meg
Blog
Member, Intown Presbyterian Church,PCA, Portland, OR

Click to get: Board Rules -- Signature Requirements -- Suggestions?

The Journey of the Magi is an interesting poem. The historical context that Evie mentioned concerning Eliot's recent conversion to Christianity vis-a-vis the Church of England leads me to think the story he is telling from the point of view of one of the Magi who travelled to visit Christ in the manger, is really his own personal account of the journey from unbelief to faith. The imagery of the first two stanzas is remarkably good -- I feel I am there with the Magi experiencing the travail of their journey. And yet, it all seems pretty anticlimatic, almost pointless. When they arrive, there is no joy or passion for the Magi: he can't even bring himself to say that his destination is "satisfactory: ("you may say"). It comes across to me as more a complaint than a rejoicing (in the Christ-child or in the new realm of faith and belief). Journeys and conversion experiences are not often easy. The road on such a path may be hard. But to arrive at one's destination and ask "were we lead all that way for Birth or Death?" is, to me, depressingly pointless. In the end, he speaks of alienation from where he came from (for the Magi, he knows something earthchanging has happened in the manger, for the Christian there is no turning back, bridges have been burned). He ends with a desire expressed to die another death. Biblically, this sounds like Paul's desire to leave this world and be with Christ. Except that Paul says it better. The way Eliot says it, it could be read if taken at face value as a suicidal expression of thought. Choosing to recognize that nothing Eliot writes should be taken only at face value, I think the line should be read thinking the writer wants to leave this pagan world behind for a better one found through the passage way of death. Death leading to rebirth is then the last phase of the Magi's/Christian's journey.

As the story of a conversion experience, I recognize that everyone's experience is different. However, it's probably the most melancholy conversion poem I have ever read. I prefer Pilgrim's Progress in which Christian, with all of his highs and lows, mountains and valleys and sloughs of despond, he presses on to his goal, knowing what he seeks, though he walks by faith not by sight, he is willing to cross the River of Death to enter the Celestial City. We all carry burdens of afflication in our journey from life to death or death to life. And sometimes we understand less than when we started but Eliot's poem to me is not inspiring. In my general view of Christian poetry, the ending of a poem about conversion ought to be hopeful, not depressing. If he was here, in my literature class, I would ask him to read George Herbert's Complaining and then do a re-write.

This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
Not with a bang but a whimper.
--T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

__________________
Ryan
1689 London Baptist Confession

It may be an incomplete conversion-experience.