The poem I was explaining was “The Journey of the Magi,” Eliot’s imaginative retelling of the story of the magi, the “wise men” who brought gifts to the young Jesus. In the poem, the speaker is one of the magi, who is recalling their journey in search of the child. In the first stanza, he recounts the difficulties of the journey in the “very dead of winter,” during which they almost give up. Then come these words:
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 wineskins.
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 wa
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.
I explained to the students that this poem is actually not only an account of the biblical magi’s journey, but also a poetic representation of Eliot’s spiritual journey. Born into a Unitarian family (his grandfather had been a Unitarian minister), by the time composed his most influential poem, the notoriously difficult The Waste Land, Eliot had reached a point of spiritual despair. Then he experienced a conversion to orthodox Christianity. This conversion had a major effect on the themes of his poetry, as much of thereafter focused on religious themes, including the poems making up his late masterpiece Four Quartets. However, the conversion process was rather difficult for him, and this reality is reflected in the poem—as the journey was for the magi, so his conversion seemed “hard and bitter agony…like Death.”
I also explained to the students that the poem was full of symbolism and double meanings. For example, as I understand it at least, the words “birth” and “death” do not refer only to literal birth and death, but also to the sort of the spiritual death that was Eliot’s difficult conversion process and the spiritual birth he experienced when he gained a new belief. Moreover, there are a number of images that hint at the Crucifixion—the “three trees on the low sky” and the men “dicing for pieces of silver”—and allusions to the idea of divine judgment—the “old white horse [a symbol of God’s judgment in the Bible] [galloping] away in the meadow.”
At the end of the class, one of my students, a Uighur, came up to me. Uighurs are a Turkic people living in China’s northwestern Xinjiang province, traditionally Muslims. They do not look like the (Han) Chinese at all, looking much more like Europeans or Americans. I had assumed that this student, a young woman, was a devout Muslim, given her very conservative dress (a headscarf and long dress covering most of her body), especially when compared with another female Uighur student, who dressed somewhat less conservatively. What surprised me, though, was that this student seemed very interested in understanding the references to “birth” and “death” and the Crucifixion in the poem—surprising since I knew that the Koran teaches that Jesus was not crucified. I don’t know whether her interest was due to mere curiosity or some deeper, spiritual prompting, but, regardless, I was intrigued by it.
As I thought about it, though, I couldn’t help thinking that this is the sort of thing that could only have happened under such circumstances—an American teacher in a Chinese classroom explaining Christian symbolism in a poem to a Muslim. It is, in part, at least, because of such experiences that I find living in China, despite its drawbacks, quite fascinating at times.
Image of T. S. Eliot from Wikipedia.org