The Journey Of The Mgai By T. S. Eliot

In the original Andrews Sermon, he also reviews the hardships of the journey and Eliot uses a few details from that later in the poem.
             After the quotation the narrator goes into details. The journey in the East could be romantic and adventurous, as it is usually described in XXth century poetry. Here it is unfriendly, frightful and deserted. Nevertheless, the "silken girls bringing sherbet" and the "summer palaces" are exotic, describing the East romantically, the way it is stereotyped in the modern West. At this part the influence of the French poet St-John Perse can be seen. Eliot translated his poem "Anabase" in 1926 and admitted that Perse had a great influence on him . The description of camels, deserts and servant girls show this influence. .
             There is a great contrast between the three Magi and the rough camel men. The Magi could resist temptation and continued their journey, while the camel men left. Nevertheless, the temptation is there in both cases, although there certainly is a difference between the way the Magi describe what they missed and the way the camel men left because of their guilty desires.
             Afterwards the pressure increases as the poet starts listing the further hardships they had to face. Here I think the narrator is starting to enter into the spirit of the unpleasant journey. There is an emotional change in the poem as if the narrator felt that he had to share all the details of his struggles, being conscious about not leaving a single part out. After that emotional part he stops complaining and reverts to the line "A hard time we had of it" to calm himself down and to get back to the cold and narrative style. With this turning back to the first line of the poem he stresses upon his message. .
             He tells that "At the end we preferred to travel all night", but the reader does not know why they had to be in a hurry as even they did not know when they had to arrive. They travelled being ready for anything while the doubt was there all the time.