The poem begins: ‘A hard time we had of it/ The very worst of the year/ For a journey and such a long journey/The ways deep and the weather sharp/The very dead of winter.” The opening lines lay down quite plainly that as important as the journey to Christ’s cradle was, the anticipation of reaching their destination in no way dulled their perception of its hardships. It was as much about journeying away from what Eliot and the Magi both knew as it was about them journeying towards something they wanted to embrace. There is no attempt to romanticise the situation or to carefully edit out the less pleasant aspects, there is only brutal honesty. The poem continues: ‘There were times we regretted/The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces/And the silken girls bringing sherbet.’ Here is an allusion to the Magi’s earlier life, but also an allusion to Eliot’s. Seeing as he was an atheist during his younger years, he had a great deal of close friends who were also atheists, who believed that religion was only something the uneducated masses subscribed to. Needless to say, they neither understood Eliot’s new found interest in religion, nor condoned it, even accusing him of ‘joining the side of the ignorant.’ This was one of the reasons Eliot found his transition so very painful; he, like the Magi, was leaving behind everything he knew in search for something he was just beginning to understand. He, like the Magi, was willingly choosing to trade in an easier, less structured life, for one in which his actions were accountable to someone other than himself.
However, not all aspects of his journey were unpleasant: ‘Then at dawn we came about a temperate valley/Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation/…/And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon/Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory. ’ These lines tell us that both the Magi and Eliot found reason and vigour enough to finish what they had set out to do. But again, the use of the word ‘satisfactory’ confirms to us that the Magi and Eliot had no wish to either fool themselves or us into believing that there were no regrets.
One of the major themes of ‘Journey’ is one of birth and death. ‘But set down/ This set down/ This: were we led all that way for Birth or Death.” ‘Birth and death’ refers not only to both the literal birth and (later) death of Christ, but also the spiritual birth and death of both the Magi and Eliot. ‘This birth was hard and bitter agony for us’ the Magi asserts, ‘Like death, our death,’ and goes on to explain why: ‘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.’ But though the poem ends with this rather sombre proclamation, the echo of the earlier lines of ‘All this was a long time ago, I remember/And I would do it again’ confirms to us that neither the Magi, nor Eliot, regretted the decision that made them strangers in their own surroundings.