IN 1927, the Bloomsbury publisher Faber and Gwyer (Faber & Faber from 1929) announced a new series of booklets suitably decorated in colours and dressed in the gayest wrappers', featuring Christmas-themed poems. With artwork supplied by established and rising talents, such as Paul and John Nash, Eric Ravilious, Eric Gill and Edward McKnight Kauffer, the publisher hoped they would find a place in the Christmas gift market. Thomas Hardy, G. K. Chesterton, W.B. Yeats and Siegfried Sassoon were among those who contributed poems to the series. T. S. Eliot, who had joined Faber two years earlier as a literary editor, having left his City job in Lloyds Bank's Colonial and Foreign Department, was to write six of what became known as The Ariel Poems. The first of these was Journey of the Magi.
The publication of the poem at Christmas 1927 came at a timely moment in Eliot's life, after his reception into the Church of England earlier that year. Eliot later explained that the poem asked the question: How fully was the Truth revealed to those who were inspired to recognise Our Lord so soon after the Nativity?'
The poem was framed around the Biblical journey of the three kings, or wise men, who came from the East to pay homage to the baby Jesus in Bethlehem. The power of the verse lay in the way Eliot turned it into a first-person narrative by one of the magi. Rather than a joyous pilgrimage, he described an arduous trek through the very dead of winter? With references to such a long journey', with camels galled, sore-footed', moving through cities hostile and towns unfriendly, it became a metaphor for the voyage Eliot believed the human spirit must make to experience Christ.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766â68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artistâs first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
