All I got out of majoring in English was . . .
. . . a love of T.S. Eliot.
And I wish I had found this poem in college too, however I was completely ignorant of it until 2 years ago when I found it on the internet. I have looked at a few websites dedicated to "deconstructing" Eliot's poetry and some of his more obscure poems like "The Waste Land" (I mean obscure as in hard to understand, not as in being little-known) cry out for some sort of interpretation. But his more accessable ones like "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and this one do not. Of course, that doesn't stop the latte-sipping pinheads from trying to pry it apart, but to me the meaning of "Magi" is clear.
I love how visual this poem is. You can almost hear the camels protests and see the Magi's breath in the cold air as they made their laborious way to Bethlehem to bear witness to the miracle.
Poetry is about economy of words. A great poet will, though word choice, diction and rhythm find a way to express something in a few verses what it would take some normal scribbler like me pages and pages to do. Here I think Eliot describes a dying pagan world on the cusp of a great change, the advent of Christianity, through the eyes of a pagan wise man. The story is told in the first person and the narrarator is reminiscing on the Birth. But he is not a Christian so he describes it thusly, "this birth was/Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death."
I once read an account from an ICU nurse who once had Ernest Hemingway as her charge, convalescing in the hospital for - I believe - pneumonia. This was in the late 60's at the time of the moonshot and the Apollo landing was all over the news at the time. The nurse recalled that Hemingway saw all of this on his hospital TV and, very melancholy, remarked to her that he was no longer living in a world that he knew. A short time later, he killed himself. That is the sentiment I think the writer expresses in the final line of this poem, "I should be glad of another death."
And I wish I had found this poem in college too, however I was completely ignorant of it until 2 years ago when I found it on the internet. I have looked at a few websites dedicated to "deconstructing" Eliot's poetry and some of his more obscure poems like "The Waste Land" (I mean obscure as in hard to understand, not as in being little-known) cry out for some sort of interpretation. But his more accessable ones like "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and this one do not. Of course, that doesn't stop the latte-sipping pinheads from trying to pry it apart, but to me the meaning of "Magi" is clear.
I love how visual this poem is. You can almost hear the camels protests and see the Magi's breath in the cold air as they made their laborious way to Bethlehem to bear witness to the miracle.
Poetry is about economy of words. A great poet will, though word choice, diction and rhythm find a way to express something in a few verses what it would take some normal scribbler like me pages and pages to do. Here I think Eliot describes a dying pagan world on the cusp of a great change, the advent of Christianity, through the eyes of a pagan wise man. The story is told in the first person and the narrarator is reminiscing on the Birth. But he is not a Christian so he describes it thusly, "this birth was/Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death."
I once read an account from an ICU nurse who once had Ernest Hemingway as her charge, convalescing in the hospital for - I believe - pneumonia. This was in the late 60's at the time of the moonshot and the Apollo landing was all over the news at the time. The nurse recalled that Hemingway saw all of this on his hospital TV and, very melancholy, remarked to her that he was no longer living in a world that he knew. A short time later, he killed himself. That is the sentiment I think the writer expresses in the final line of this poem, "I should be glad of another death."
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