T S Eliot's Journey of the Magi

T.S. Eliot's proof in a single poem that the experiments of modernism - adopting a personae rather than the personal voice of the poet, free verse "composed in the rhythm of the musical phase (or of speech and thought patterns) rather than the metronome", concreteness, imagism, detachment, feeling delivered through object correlative rather than sentimentality and bombast - could produce a masterpiece as good as any. The symbolist details arranged in the narrative like a painting (a triptych), foreshadowing Christ's future at his birth and which produce in the middle section the 'temperate valley' in which the wonderful Nativity unsentimentally and realistically yet heartwarmingly occurs flanked by the two colder pictures of the journey and then the living death of the old world they no longer belong to. Performed over our version of the Nativity carol "In The Bleak Midwinter" which seemed to fit beautifully at every point and lit by a serendipitous burst of winter sunshine through the window during filming. If I remember my 'O' Level correctly, I think this was around the time that T.S. Eliot the great modernist iconoclast of the Castle Land and Prufrock threw a curve ball towards a crypto-Christian conversion in his Ariel poems. The Journey of the Magi (1927) "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. 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 arriving 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

Birth of a Human Being

My snow soul is slowly taking shape,

Falling from heaven to inherit the earth

And the family features of God and ape,

Angel out of my element from birth…

And this is me, this helpless drop of Man,

This perfect mould of bud and mineral,

Crawling, flight, and every earthly thing.

All of it – nothing.

                                          Yet I’ll assert I AM

In time by striving upright endlessly;

Inherit here a kiss, to milk, like grist,

The love that made me, and by which I’m born;

The word that speaks its perfect mind, the fist

That grasps its imaged God; the whole torn

And bleeding womb of human history.

Note: 35 years ago today, in the Queen Elizabeth hospital King's Lynn, I witnessed my wife giving birth to our firstborn, still favourite (and only) child, Emma. Things started mid afternoon at a quiet and in my case traditionally bilious long school term post-Christmas get together with the neighbours at about 3 pm the day before and went on all night and all morning and just into the following afternoon. (I remember noticing that Norwich City won 2-1, wondering how such a remote event could register.) It was horrendous enough witnessing the birth. I am glad I never had to achieve the feat myself. But it was of course the ultimate labour of love and today, incredibly, our daughter is 35 years old. She has since extended the line by marrying our favourite son in law and giving birth at the same hospital (really nice Maternity unit btw) to two children herself, a daughter who will be four in February and a son who will be two in October.

35 years ago about now, I came home, wrung out by the experience, pranged the car reversing into the drive into a discarded dining room table I forgot we'd left there, and - exhausted, relieved, delirious - wrote , no, not this sonnet but a precursor of it called 'Animal'. A few days later, I picked my family up from QE and we started the greatest adventure, most important human activity and worst paid career of child rearing. Providentially it snowed almost as soon as I'd got them home and we were cocooned for a week, a much needed accidental paternity leave in the age before they gave you any. During that week in lieu, I wrote this sonnet.

Happy birthday Emma! XX