Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Monday, December 30th, 2004. As we hang on to the last few days of 2024 here, it is still the Christmas season. This is the sixth day. We're halfway through proverbial 12 days of Christmas. This is the

six geese laying, fortunately or unfortunately for you, depending on how much you like that sort of thing.

This poem today has nothing to do with geese laying eggs. It is by William Butler Yates,

and it's called The Magi.

I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and then read it one more time.

Now, as at all times I can see in the mind's eye, in their stiff painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones appear and

disappear in the blue depths of the sky with all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,

and all their helms of silver hovering side by side, and all their eyes still fixed,

hoping to find once more being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied,

the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

This is a short, terse poem, and I think that matches with the tone.

This is written in 1914, and William Butler Yates is around 50.

He's past middle age, but he has several decades left in him.

And this is certainly, I think, a searching period for Yates.

He was the grandson and great-grandson of clergymen in Ireland, the church playing a significant role in the life of his extended family.

But Yates himself came as a young man to be far more enthralled by spiritualism, a kind of folk mysticism, Irish legends and fairy tales that made up a far more compelling

spirituality to him for a long period of his life.

Though, in his final decades, he seemed to make a return to the church and faith of his youth, really in the decade of the 20s,

going so far as to argue for and defend the place of the church in Irish society and debates in parliament.

But here we find him seeing in the Magi, the Three Wise Men, a kind of dissatisfaction that seems confessional,

seems to be wrestling with it himself.

And it's such a natural choice, it seems, to focus on the Magi as a kind of vessel for these feelings of conflict or dissatisfaction or confused,

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