A New Anglican Reads Old Things: "We regretted / The summer palaces"

Emily Garcia, was raised in the Evangelical Free Church. In her freshman year at Princeton she was baptized at the Easter Vigil, and joined the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion four weeks later when she was confirmed on Good Shepherd Sunday. She is a Postulant in the discernment process for the priesthood, is a published poet, and is this year’s Kellogg Fellow at the Chaplaincy.

No Advent season is complete without someone bringing up T. S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi,” so I’m here to perform that service for you. Epiphany is the more liturgically appropriate day to talk about the Magi, but I can’t stop thinking about these strange, foreign men on a journey to somewhere they didn’t know.

That’s how Eliot casts, them, at least. Their journey is “such a long journey: / The ways deep and the weather sharp,” and they have plenty of time to regret “the summer palaces on slopes, the terraces” they left behind, plenty of time to listen to “the voices singing in our ears, saying / That this was all folly.”

After the noise and frustration of travel, Eliot’s wise men come to “a temperate valley,” with “a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness, / And three trees on the low sky.” And here they find the place, “not a moment too soon.” But what they find leads this one wise man—the speaker of the poem—to ask, years later, “This: were we led all that way for / Birth or Death?” He sees there is obviously a birth, but for the Magi it is “Hard and bitter,” “like Death, our death.” He returns to his kingdom, but he is “no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, / With an alien people clutching their gods.” 

So if, on their journey out to Bethlehem, they left behind the “summer palaces” and “silken girls,” they now have lost them in an entirely different way. The palaces, terraces, sherbet, girls and gods—the previous pleasures of their lives—have become alien to them, because of what they encountered in Bethlehem.
A couple weeks ago I preached about St. Bernard’s “middle Advent”—in between the birth of Christ and the return of Christ in glory, when Christ comes to us now, in a “hidden and interior” advent in our hearts. This advent is often not when or what we expect, and we have a hard time pinning it down. As we wait for Christmas, we’re also waiting for Christ to come to us today, in some unknown way.

Eliot’s Magi show us the other side of this same coin—even as we’re waiting for Christ to come to us, we’re also on our way to see him. We’re on a journey to Bethlehem, and although we know there will be a birth when we get there, we can’t yet know what it will mean for us. What in our lives may have to go, may have to die, because of this Birth? When we encounter the newborn Christ in Mary’s arms, will we be like this poem’s speaker, and return to our previous lives, only to feel “alien” in them? Or will we leave “our places, these Kingdoms,” and find our home in a different sort of Kingdom?

Journey of the Magi

by T.S. Eliot

            ‘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 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 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.

Tissot's The Journey of the Magi