Following is a poem by T.S Eliot called "The Journey Of The Magi." After it is a sample body paragraph about the second stanza.
The Journey Of The Magi
'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.'
And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
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.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arriving at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you might say) satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
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.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
Here is a paragraph analyzing Stanza 2:
SAMPLE ANALYTICAL BODY PARAGRAPH – POETRY ANALYSIS
Sample Thesis
In "The Journey of the Magi," T.S. Eliot explores the ambiguity of the religious conversion experience through his use of structure, imagery, symbolism, and tone.
Paragraph on the second stanza:
In the second stanza, Eliot creates a transition from the experience of the journey in stanza one to the bewilderingly ambivalent feeling about the experience of being "born again" in the third. Not surprisingly, biblical imagery predominates in this transitional stanza. The poet's "three trees on the low sky" (l. 24) clearly prefigures the scene on Calvary that emanates from the nativity that the speaker is in search of; the assonance of "three" and "trees" draws attention to this as the central symbol of the stanza. Further, the "hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver" (l. 27) combines allusions to both the Roman executioners gambling for Jesus' clothing and the betrayal by Judas for thirty pieces of silver. By juxtaposing these images of death with the contrasting symbols of life like dawn and vine leaves, Eliot is anticipating the confused reactions to Birth and Death that appear later. However, it is Eliot's use of the understated word "satisfactory" describing his narrator's reaction to the mystical nativity that most effectively underscores the ambivalence of the speaker: the long-sought encounter with the object of the spiritual journey is expressed in distinctively neutral tones.
