T.S. Eliot

Journey of the Magi

The way I interpreted this poem was it was written from the view of one of the wise men headed to visit the new born Christ child. The way he describes the camels journey gives the impression they are in the desert: “ 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.”

Also in that passage I felt as if he was turning his back on the old ways of his beliefs and looking towards the new one that were emerging. It seems that at the end of the poem the person making this journey has accepted the change because he wrote: ‘we returned to our palaces, these Kingdoms, /But not longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,/With an alien people clutching their gods./I should be glad of another death”. After their journey he returns back to his Kingdom, and because of the change that came from within he is no longer happy with the old ways of life. I think that he sees that by dying ‘again” it will cause a “rebirth” in the form of his new found faith, by Dying he frees himself from his old beliefs and is reborn in the new ways.