Journey of the Magi by T.S. Eliot

            I feel like the speaker in the “Journey of the Magi” is one of the three wise men that travelled to Bethlehem for the birth of Jesus. In the first stanza, I imagined the wise men were having an awful time traveling.

                        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. (13-16)

            It seemed as though Eliot was describing their journey as backbreaking and full of hardships. They were obviously not treated as royalty and did not travel with great luxury.

            In the second stanza, T.S. Eliot describes their arrival in Bethlehem by saying, “Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.” (31). I believe that this expresses a kind of relief the gentlemen felt once they reached their destination after a long, excruciating journey.

            The third and final stanza made me believe that the first two stanzas were a memory of the past of one of the three wise men. The first line of this stanza, “All this was a long time ago, I remember,” gave the hint that the speaker was recalling the past (32).