Suffering
Much of the poem is a complaint about the suffering experienced by the Magi on their journey to reach Bethlehem. They endure terrible weather, uncooperative camels and camel men, and hostile townspeople. They also suffer mentally and emotionally as they realize the imminent death of their way of life. The suffering of Jesus is also foreshadowed in the many biblical allusions in the third stanza. The poem overall is dour and anti-climactic, and suggests that religious conversion is a difficult process.
These two passages especially exemplify the theme:
"'A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'"
The Magi endure physical misery in the freezing cold, the opposite of the warm luxury they are used to.
“And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
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.”
This describes the suffering of being homeless in an unfamiliar place, without support. It mirrors the experience of Mary and Joseph seeking a place to give birth to Jesus.
Doubt
In the first stanza, the Magi struggle with doubting their religious faith. They experience mental anguish as they hear the voices of others questioning their decision: “With the voices singing in our ears, saying/That this was all folly.” In the final stanza the Magus doubts the purpose of their journey. He thought that they were going to witness a birth, but what the ultimately saw was a death—of both Jesus, and his own way of life as a pagan. He says that, rationally, they had evidence of a birth. But the emotional feeling was of the opposite. So he struggles with the paradox at the heart of the experience. We can see the doubt play out in the following passage:
“And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.”
Death
For the Magi, the birth of Jesus Christ heralds not only his impending death by crucifixion for the sins of humanity, but also the death of their own pagan way of life—their traditions and power.
The poem contains many allusions to the life and death of Christ in the New Testament; for example, the “three trees on the low sky” represents the crucifixion.
"Journey of the Magi" was published shortly after Eliot’s baptism into the Church of England. The magus describes Jesus' birthplace as "(you may say) satisfactory,” and scholars have pointed to the way that the word "satisfactory" is used in the Anglican Articles: Jesus was sent to “satisfy” the debt of the world’s sins being committed in Pagan culture. So this passage thus refers obliquely to the spiritual death of the Magi’s culture with the advent of Christianity.
