Are blogging and social media as much about complaints as they are about praise? I can’t say for sure on that. One reason there: my personal appetite for a good rant or jeremiad has limits. But sometimes — even when the subject is something you’re fond of— within a negative review, you might see something new you never appreciated.

The Christmas season ended yesterday with Epiphany, the Christian church calendar date on which the Three Wise Men, kings or soothsayers from the East, legendarily visit the newborn infant god-head.

It’s a favored event for painters of Christian religious scenes, since it has the rich aroma of an Incarnation appearing in a rude stable, and yet at the same time it allows the depiction of exotic, wealthy, well-attired prince/priests bringing gifts to the child. The Renaissance artists often loved depth of detail, and this gives them so much to depict.

For the holiday season at the end of 1921, T. S. Eliot wrote a poem for this last day of the 12-days of Christmas. In his “Journey of the Magi”  he exercises one of his youthful talents: flavorful disjointed poetic dialog expressive of different human aspects infused with sound and high and low cultural references. His poem is a poetic monolog by one of the Wise Men — but it omits the moment in the paintings: the worshipful giving of gifts to the baby Jesus. You can read the full text of the poem at this link if you’d like to follow along.

Instead, the poem opens with a bad review of the travel to Bethlehem. To paraphrase, the first stanza: look, we had it good in our temperate-zone palaces, servants bringing us cool sherbet treats, and now we’re out here where it’s either too hot or too cold, in a place no one knows how important we are.

In the poem’s second stanza we do get in words some of the matter of those Renaissance paintings — you could see the brush-hand of a Bruegel in it. We smell the landscape, there’s a little stream, a water-mill, a singular white horse, a tavern with the (later post-mortem) pieces of silver being gambled for, drinker’s feet tripping over wine-skins, There should be a saint, and angel, or the Holy Family in this painting too, resplendent in the foreground — but our speaker leaves any of that out. I love the Yelp review that ends this stanza: not the max-stars that everyone is urged to leave: “(you may say) satisfactory.”

In the last stanza Eliot’s monologist gets to hint at the piety that would later take over that poet’s outlook. After all, the Three Priests or Kings or Sages that have traveled so far are not believers in the story, only esoteric knowers. Their testimony is that they know the Christian incarnation is important, but they don’t know or believe why. Our speaker says, recalling the trip on the sore camel’s back across the desert, moor, and mountains, just that he has some sense that his former comforts, his kingdom, his belief, his place in things, his magic, has been changed some way. What comes next after the death of his homeplace belief? He doesn’t know, but somehow he senses it’ll be better.

That’s often a good story isn’t it — that kings are just a convention, a shared or temporarily-enforced belief?

Speaking of Bruegel, here’s a painting of the Adoration of the Magi by him. Looking at the king in crimson on the left: from the expression on that face, I think we can imagine he’s the speaker in Eliot’s poem.

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Even though today’s poem is written of events remembered in the past, I’m late with this piece. I performed it yesterday, on the suitable date, but it was nearing the stroke of midnight when I laid down the last track. This morning after breakfast and grocery shopping I mixed the version you can hear below. I thought about putting in caroling bells or angelic voices in the arrangement, but as I worked with Eliot’s words I figured it might be better to decorate it with some Silk Road instruments, ones that might have been heard in the better stops on the Three Kings’ journey: the oud an the santoor. But there’s also a drum set, a piano, and an electric bass — and I can’t figure out how a camel could carry those! You can hear my performance of “The Journey of the Magi”  with the audio player below. No player seen? You’re not too late, it’s just the way some ways of viewing this blog suppress showing that, so I offer this shining star, or rather highlighted link which will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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