This is a remarkable poem.
In its structure: I am always a bit tickled by its one noticeable rhyme: line 6 ends with “refractory”, and we hear its echo in line 32’s “satisfactory.”
But it isn’t the structure that makes this lapsed Catholic listen each Christmas. It is Eliot’s restless imagination. What would it have been like for the Three Kings? Not a comfortable trip, and when they recognized what had beckoned them, an unease to gnaw at them as they returned.
We have recordings by John Gielgud and Alec Guinness. Let’s hear from the author: