Eliot

Much of Eliot’s poetry explores the relationship between the sacred and the profane, and how one lives in the profane world while striving for the sacred. As he says, it’s fitting the square to the circle. “Journey of the Magi”, one of the Ariel poems, was written around the time of Eliot’s own personal conversion. Through the eyes of one of the three wise men, Eliot explores traveling the road of religion paved in a profane world, and the complexities that come with choosing that religious path. After seeing the Christ child, and returning to his native land, the Magus feels “no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,/With an alien people clutching their god”. His conversion, which is a combined death and birth results in an existence out of sync with the rest of the world. After such long and weary traveling, he says it was…satisfactory. Not the word one expects in describing the birth of the Son of God. But conversion, coming to worship at the feet of the Savior, rarely ends with fireworks and cotton candy.
The Magus questions what led them there. Was it Birth or was it Death? In Christianity, it is Christ’s death that makes His birth something worth noticing. No one would note the birth of a child in an obscure village in the Middle East, had not that child, according to Christianity, proceeded to suffer a heinous death and miraculous resurrection 33 years later. This is one aspect that the Magus ponders. ON the other hand, at his conversion, was he reborn, or did his previous self pass away? And if it is both, and the Birth brings only this other-world existence, then the only thing to do is await the next death, and birth into the next world.