There are countless Christmas carols and countless popular Christmas songs recorded by countless popular singers. On the other hand, there are far fewer songs written about Epiphany. It is likely that only one, We Three Kings of Orient Are, will spring readily to mind. Similarly, there are countless Christmas poems but relatively few about Epiphany.
Among the all too rare poems about the arrival of the Three Wise Men are two written by two of the greatest poets of the twentieth century.
"Journey of the Magi"
T. S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” tells the story of the Wise Men in their own words, many years after the event, long after they’d returned home. The tone is almost mundane. Understated. A faded and fading memory of an old adventure. There was hardship. A long journey in the very dead of winter, “camels galled, sore-footed, refractory, lying down in the melting snow”. In the midst of the hardship, there were moments of regret for the journey they’d undertaken. Why had they not stayed home in warmth and luxury? “All this was a long time ago, I remember, And I would do it again….”
It is then, recalling the journey, the pilgrimage, that the Wise Man asks the wisest of questions: “Were we led all that way for Birth or Death?”
I had seen birth or death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
Return to a land of exile
Having witnessed the best possible news, the birth of the Saviour, the Son of God, they had returned home to a wasteland of ignorance, which had made their own homes a land of exile, a vale of tears.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
In this vision of the psychological impact of the return of the Magi to their own homes as strangers to all that was once familiar, T. S. Eliot is making the Wise Men representatives of all converts to Christianity. Having received the joy of the Christ Child and the Peace that He promises, the old worldly promises seem lifeless, empty, meaningless. Truth is no longer found in the trite and the trivial or in the indulgence of creature comforts. It is to be found in Christ alone.
"Twelfth Night"
A similar wistfulness and melancholy is found in “Twelfth Night” by Hilaire Belloc. The poet recalls a winter’s night in the depths of a wood in which he had come upon “a company of Travellers who would talk with me”. It was a clear night with a bright moon but these mysterious and ghostly travellers cast no shadow. “There was no man for miles a-near,” the poet writes. “I would not walk with them for fear.”
Spurning their company, he is left alone in the woods as the elven company moved on through the trees. A star in heaven glowed. An ox across the darkness lowed. And then a burning light appears in the very heart of the wood and, in the distance, he can hear singing: “They sang a song I used to know, Gloria in Excelsis Domino”:
The frozen way those people trod
It led toward the Mother of God;
Perhaps if I had travelled with them
I might have come to Bethlehem.
Yearning to believe
In some ways, Belloc’s “Twelfth Night” is very different from T. S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi”. Eliot’s account of the miracle of the manger is in the mundane language of one of the Magi themselves, an eyewitness account. Belloc’s account is full of magic and mystery. It is the voice of one in the wilderness who wishes wistfully to see what the Wise Men have seen. The first is told from the perspective of one who has seen and believed. The second is told by one who has not seen and yet yearns to believe.
May we have the courage to follow without fear the way that the saints have trod that leads to the Mother of God. Perhaps if we travel with them, we might also come to Bethlehem.
