Journey of the Magi

“Journey of the Magi” is a free-verse poem by T. S. Eliot, published in 1927 as an illustrated card for Christmas. Belonging to Eliot’s middle period, the poem is a dramatic monologue in which the speaker is one of the three wise men who brought gifts to the infant Jesus in Bethlehem. He describes the journey they took and looks back in old age at the significance of the events surrounding the birth.

Eliot wrote the poem shortly after his conversion to the Anglican faith, and it helped him get over the writer’s block he had been experiencing for more than a year or so. As a poem about Christian faith, it marks a new thematic departure for Eliot, and it may reflect something of his own spiritual journey. For the Magus who narrates the poem, his spiritual rebirth involved pain and suffering because his new faith put him at odds with his own society, in which people continued to worship their pagan gods.

Poet Biography

Poet, dramatist, literary critic, and editor Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on September 26, 1888, in St. Louis, Missouri.