Compared to pre-20th century poetry, TS Eliot's poetry sounds vibrant, unconventional and creative. Eliot's poem "The Journey of the Magi" is typical of his style and illustrates how Eliot's poetry changed the genre forever. In its compression of images and language, "The Journey of the Magi" is a complex poem, reflecting the complex world of the 20th century. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay The poem tells of the journey of the wise men to see the birth of Christ. Traditionally, the magi in this tale are filled with a sense of wonder and excitement for the new king. They travel from afar and bring the most beautiful gifts such as gold, frankincense and myrrh. In Eliot's "Journey of the Magi", the magi are not characterized by the same sense of wonder and enthusiasm; they make the journey without full understanding or interest. The gifts traditionally associated with them are not even mentioned. The first lines of the poem set a negative tone; they explain that the journey took place in the "worst time of the year" and in "the dead of winter" (2; 5). This tone surprises the reader because traditionally wise men are portrayed as pious and reverent, hardly the type to complain about how long or cold the journey is. Furthermore, since the poem is a retelling, evidently because of the quotation marks around the first five lines, one would expect the wise men to have forgotten the negative aspects of the journey in light of their conversion. Comparing the tone of this monologue to Odysseus' monologue in Tennyson's Ulysses, we see that Eliot is not concerned with perpetuating a picturesque myth but rather with constructing a realistic, even ordinary, perspective for his characters. This is a major shift for poetry: whereas it once focused on conventional images of beauty such as nature, landscapes, and singing birds, Eliot extracts beauty from the mundane. As the poem continues, the narrator provides imagery from the journey, although he never directly describes the landscape. In a word, the journey is disastrous: their means of transport, the camels, is miserable; their guides, the camel men, are unreliable and the cities are hostile. The wise men "long for" the bygone days of "summer palaces on the slopes, terraces, / and silk girls who brought sherbet" (8-10). The word “regret” is an interesting choice because there are two relevant meanings: it could mean that the wise regret or long for past times, or that they feel sorry for them. Both interpretations of the word can be supported: since the wise men are going on a winter journey, one would expect them to miss home (and summer); furthermore, considering their spiritual conversion, one would expect the magi to repent of the idleness in which they had spent times gone by. The reader's uncertainty parallels the magi's uncertainty throughout the poem. At the end of the first stanza, the wise men do not seem to have a full understanding of the journey. With the line “that all this was madness” (20), the reader is invited to provide the meaning that the magi missed. In the next stanza, the reader is actively engaged in deciphering the meaning of the poem. The magi reach a valley that smells of vegetation, where a stream and a water mill flow. These are all images of birth, in direct contrast to the images of death in the first stanza. Although opposites, birth and death are connected through the relationship between the snow and the valley: the snow, an image of struggle and death, gives the valley the humidity that causes vegetation, a symbol of birth. This relationship between birth and death is revisited later in the poem. There.