Eliot, Epiphany and the End of the Year

  T.S. Eliot is a voice in my head at this graced time of the year. That is odd as I am not a fan of Eliot.  I lack the patience to read serious poetry, so I only fall upon it – or it falls on me – by accident.  Today or tomorrow I shall read Murder in the Cathedral again. Over the coming days I will listen – several times – to Eliot himself read  “The Journey of the Magi,” on the  BBC recording on YouTube. That's for the run-up to Epiphany.

 I first met Murder in the Cathedral in a production staged in an Episcopal cathedral (of all places, if you think about it). It covers the assassination of Archbishop Thomas Becket at the hands of four barons unleashed by his old friend and benefactor, King Henry II. In some ways, Becket’s death parallels the death of another Thomas, More, at the instigation of another Henry, the VIII. But they were 365 years apart, and in Becket’s time church and state both followed the pope. Henry and Becket were each other’s problem. The assassination shocked everyone in the era. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer’s pilgrims are heading for Becket’s shrine.

 For the theater Eliot wrote a meditation on martyrdom as itself a possible temptation. He doesn’t load the dice in favor of hagiography, either; the barons get the last word, although the more they speak it the more they hang themselves. There is also a subtext (which surprised me  coming from Eliot) in which the “little people,” appearing as a Greek chorus, lament their fate of feeling the blows when the world’s great and good slug it out:

            For us, the poor, there is no action,

           But only to wait and to witness.

 Becket -- whose feast today is obligatory in England (and my household) but optional elsewhere  – was also put on stage by Jean Anouilh. That play was, loosely, the basis of the Burton-O’Toole film in which Burton decreed an excommunication so powerfully that I decided I never wanted to be excommunicated by Richard Burton.

 "The Journey of the Magi" is a poem, it’s first person narrator one of the Wise Men who followed the star, although it doesn’t mention the star. Nor does it mention the stable (as it shouldn’t). When they finally arrive, they find “the place (you might say) satisfactory.” That's all.

After the detail of refractory camels and the hostile cities and unfriendly towns on the way out, the lack of detail about the destination is a jolt. It quickly turns to wondering whether they say a birth or a death:

 … There was a birth, certainly.

 We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and I had seen death,

 But I had thought they were different….

On YouTube you can find readings by Sir Alec and Sir John, too. But the poet sounds most like a magus once regretting the silken girls bringing sherbets and now finding where he had come from to be, you might say, unsatisfactory.