“Journey of the Magi” is a poem by T.S Eliot extracted from the Ariel poems and published in 1930. It is a dramatic monologue of one of the Magi telling us about his expedition throughout Palestine to find the Christian messiah: Jesus Christ. Through the narrator’s dramatic monologue, Eliot treats the envisioning of reality, usually distorted by the human mind. In the poem, the travelers witness something that changes their reality forever. How does this monologue illustrate the narrator’s envision of his experience traveling through Palestine? In order to analyze the narrator’s perception of his past journey, I will precede with the study of Eliot’s poem by a linear analysis.
In his dramatic monologue, Eliot uses vivid understanding of the three Kings journey by the use of imagery. The different use of details guides the reader to use his imagination about a Biblical reference of more than 2,000 years ago. The narrator starts his story by describing the climate challenges encountered: “A cold coming we had of it.” He uses the diction of winter: “cold, winter, snow”, combining visual and tactile senses for the reader to experience the difficulties faced by the three wise men. The narrator is generally very negative about what he encounters during his trip. He uses pejorative vocabulary in order describes the season: “Just the worst time of the year”. (v.2) “deep and sharp weather” (v.4) “the very dead of winter” (v.5). Not only the Three Kings seem to be tired and upset about their adventure, but their camels as well. They were “lying down in the melting snow” (v.7) “galled, sore-footed and refractory”. The role of this enumeration is to insist on the animal’s physical fatigue and also to show that both human and animals were affected by the weather conditions.
In the second half of the first stanza, the narrator describes summer in the different cities he and the other kings traveled. By taking track of the seasons, the Magi inform the reader about the length of his Palestine journey. The transition from winter to summer setting is smoothly made by the verse: “There were times we regretted.” (v.8), which exemplifies the Magi’s envision of his experience. The challenges of the trip were so great and unexpected that most of the times tempted the three Kings to give up on their mission in finding the Messiah. The Magi depicts palaces, terraces, sherbet (a central Asia’s sorbet) and silken girls to help the reader visualize the places he passed by.
This poem captures the immigrant experience between the two worlds, leaving the homeland and towards the new world. The poet has deliberately structured the poem in five sections each with a number of stanzas to divide the different stages of the physical voyage. Section one describes the refugees, two briefly deals with their reason for the exodus, three emphasises their former oppression, fourth section is about the healing effect of the voyage and the concluding section deals with the awakening of hope. This restructuring allows the poet to focus on the emotional and physical impact of the journey.
For each seasonal section, there is a progression from beginning to end within the season. Each season is compiled in a progressive nature with poetry describing the beginning of a season coming before poetry for the end of the season. This is clear for spring, which starts with, “fallen snow [that] lingers on” and concludes with a poet lamenting that “spring should take its leave” (McCullough 14, 39). The imagery progresses from the end of winter, with snow still lingering around to when the signs of spring are disappearing. Although each poem alone does not show much in terms of the time of the year, when put into the context of other poems a timeline emerges from one season to the next. Each poem is linked to another poem when it comes to the entire anthology. By having each poem put into the context of another, a sense of organization emerges within each section. Every poem contributes to the meaning of a group of poems. The images used are meant to evoke a specific point in each season from the snow to the blossoms to the falling of the blossoms. Since each poem stands alone and has no true plot they lack the significance than if they were put into th...
Thomas Stearns Eliot was perhaps one of the most critical writers in the English language’s history. Youngest of seven children and born to the owner of a Brick Company, he wasn’t exactly bathed in poverty at all. Once he graduated from Harvard, he went on to found the Unitarian church of St. Luis. Soon after, Eliot became more serious about literature. As previously stated, his literature works were possibly some of the most famous in history. Dr. Tim McGee of Worland High School said that he would be the richest writer in history if he was still alive, and I have no choice but to believe him. In the past week many of his works have been observed in my English literature class. Of Thomas Stearns Eliot’s poems Preludes, The Journey of the Magi, The Hollow Men, The Waste Land, and Four Quartets, I personally find his poem The Hollow men to be the most relatable because of its musical allusions, use of inclusive language, and his opinion on society.
The “Gift of the Magi”, by O. Henry, is a short story that unfolds in an unanticipated and remarkable way that gently tugs the reader in which makes them want to continue reading. The story is about two characters named Della and Jim. For Christmas, Della cuts her hair to sell for money to buy Jim a chain for his watch while Jim sells his watch to buy Della some fancy combs. They both couldn’t use each other's gifts properly by reason of them sacrificing what they loved likewise finding delight in giving - what is foolish in the head, may be wise for the heart.
The poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” written by T.S. Eliot is a depiction of sadness and a disillusioned narrator. While reading this poem, one senses that the narrator is disturbed and has maybe given up hope, and that he feels he is just an actor in a tedious drama At the very beginning of the poem, Eliot uses a quote from Dante’s “Inferno”, preparing the poem’s reader to expect a vision of hell. This device seems to ask the reader to accept that what they are about to be told by the poem’s narrator was not supposed to be revealed to the living world, as Dante was exposed to horrors in the Inferno that were not supposed to be revealed to the world of the living. This comparison is frightening and intriguing, and casts a shadow on the poem and its narrator before it has even begun. J. Alfred Prufrock is anxious, self-concsious, and depressed.
... As each character begins to “emerge from that stupidity” (198) of delusion, they are given the opportunity to show their true moral standing through the way in which they deal with the realities—the realities with which they are confronted with after the illusions starts rubbing off. Dorothea morally elevates herself in the post-imaginative state, showing her ability to accept her duties. Whereas, Lydgate is less satisfying, forcing himself into a perpetual compromise in which he maintains some of his illusion while completely sacrificing his goals and himself to the consequences. Thus, this temptation to imagine is inescapable in the world of Middlemarch, and—as Eliot informs the reader—in the world at large: “We are all of us imaginative in some form or other, for images are the brood of desire,” in this inescapable “fellowship of illusion” (304).
...fall of snow and the unremitting “sweep” of “easy wind” appear tragically indifferent to life, in turn stressing the value of Poirier’s assessment of the poem. Frost uses metaphor in a way that gives meaning to simple actions, perhaps exploring his own insecurities before nature by setting the poem amongst a tempest of “dark” sentiments. Like a metaphor for the workings of the human mind, the pull between the “promises” the traveller should keep and the lure of death remains palpably relevant to modern life. The multitudes of readings opened up through the ambiguity of metaphor allows for a setting of pronounced liminality; between life and death, “night and day, storm and heath, nature and culture, individual and group, freedom and responsibility,” Frost challenges his readers to delve deep into the subtlety of tone and come to a very personal conclusion.
The central scenes contain the heart of the drama, that for which the rest exists – the drama of the revelation. The poet’s task here is to make its effect adequate to the expectation. He manages to spin it out to nearly 500 lines, and, instead of thinning, increases the excitement by spreading it out; it becomes a threefold revelation rising to a climax (36).
T.S. Eliot has been one of the most daring innovators of twentieth-century poetry. His poem“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, is different and unusual. He rejects the logic connection, thus, his poems lack logic interpretation. He himself justifies himself by saying: he wrote it to want it to be difficult. The dissociation of sensibility, on the contrary, arouses the emotion of readers immediately. This poem contains Prufrock’ s love affairs. But it is more than that. It is actually only the narration of Prufrock, a middle-aged man, and a romantic aesthete , who is bored with his meaningless life and driven to despair because he wished but
The depiction of fall to winter, shown in William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 73,” holds a far deeper meaning behind the changing of the seasons. Shakespeare is able to delineate both a literal meaning of fall coming to an end as the chill of winter begins, and also a metaphorical message of people as they begin to change and grow older through time.
The original story the Gift of the Magi written by O. Henry in 1905 was adapted into a played out version by Sesame Street using puppets, Bert and Ernie. The Gift of the Magi written by O. Henry is a story with a complicated, subtle theme and to really understand it you have to compare the two versions of the two stories. When we take a look at both of these stories one being a written story and the other being a video, we see that they are similar on some things with the main idea but also different in multiple ways. An examination of the two versions will reveal that there are several similarities with the same irony, but they do have some differences with the plot and the characters.
Moody, Anthony David. The Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 121. Print.
T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is an elaborate and mysterious montage of lines from other works, fleeting observations, conversations, scenery, and even languages. Though this approach seems to render the poem needlessly oblique, this style allows the poem to achieve multi-layered significance impossible in a more straightforward poetic style. Eliot’s use of fragmentation in The Waste Land operates on three levels: first, to parallel the broken society and relationships the poem portrays; second, to deconstruct the reader’s familiar context, creating an individualized sense of disconnection; and third, to challenge the reader to seek meaning in mere fragments, in this enigmatic poem as well as in a fractious world.
To understand this poem, one has to understand the impact that Christ had on the World. At the time of his birth, however, the known world was not stable; people worshipped many gods, and we get a full description of the way life was by the Magus who narrates his story of their journey to Bethlehem to witness the end of an era and the birth of a new one.
T.S Eliot, widely considered to be one of the fathers of modern poetry, has written many great poems. Among the most well known of these are “The Waste Land, and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, which share similar messages, but are also quite different. In both poems, Eliot uses various poetic techniques to convey themes of repression, alienation, and a general breakdown in western society. Some of the best techniques to examine are ones such as theme, structure, imagery and language, which all figure prominently in his poetry. These techniques in particular are used by Eliot to both enhance and support the purpose of his poems.