Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is December 31st, 2024.

And we're going to send the year out with none other than T.S. Eliot.

Today's poem is none other than his masterful and moving journey of the Magi.

In ancient Christianity, the arrival of the Magi in Bethlehem and the birth of Jesus

himself were celebrated on the same occasion. And before the date of December 25th was permanently

agreed upon as the date for celebrating Christmas, that observance took place on or around January 6th.

Over time, there have been some developments in those observances.

In the East, those two elements still coincide as parts of Christmas.

So the Magi are characters of the Nativity Feast. That's why you see them in creches and

nativity scenes. And then January 6th is the feast of Theophony, which is connected to the baptism of Jesus. In the West, the

arrival of the Magi has been sort of thematically partitioned, and now

January 6th is the observance of the Feast of Epiphany, which is the arrival of the Magi and the

revealing of Christ to the nations. And in that arrangement, the Magi then are representatives of

the larger Gentile nations outside of Judaism.

I offer all of that as a defense of continuing to read and feature poems about the Magi

along after December 25th. We're on the 7th of 12 days of Christmas, so well within the window, in case there are any grinches or scrooges out there.

We've had enough of the Christmas poetry. Hang in there. We're almost through. This is a fine way to bring it home at the end of the year.

This poem by Elliot has some

thematic similarities. It's a nice companion to yesterday's poem by W.B. Yates,

although this poem, I think, is more objectively hopeful. It does something remarkable that

some of my favorite poems do and it is interrogate it's a

...