When we think of the poet T.S. Eliot in the context of the celebration of Christmas, most of us would particularly remember his "Journey of the Magi." He wrote the poem in 1927, at the time of his mature-age baptism and confirmation in the Church of England.

It is the first of his five "Ariel" poems, four of them produced annually from 1927 to 1930 by his publishers, Faber and Faber, as "a kind of Christmas card," Eliot noted. The last and late addition to the series, "The Cultivation of Christmas Trees" (1954) discounts "several attitudes towards Christmas": "the social, the torpid, the patently commercial, / The rowdy (the pubs being open until midnight)" and focuses on the "great joy" of the Feast which also brings "a great fear":

Because the beginning shall remind us of the end And the first coming of the second coming.

The much earlier "Journey of the Magi" brings into sharp focus several of the main and abiding themes of Eliot's Christian faith, which he was to pursue devotedly for the second half of his life, until his death in 1965. As a Christmas poem, it is inspired by the doctrine of the Incarnation, of the Word made Flesh. This, along with the doctrine of Original Sin, was central to the poet's theology and spirituality, as of his Christian poetry. It culminates in the sequence Four Quartets, completed during the Second World War. In the third Quartet, "The Dry Salvages," the Incarnation is explicitly mentioned, but with humility: "the hint half guessed, the gift half understood."

Eliot defined his political, literary and religious position in 1928 in a much-quoted threefold formula as "royalist in politics, classicist in literature, and anglo-catholic in religion." The Catholic cast of his Anglican faith inclined him to believe that the Incarnation and the sacraments of the Church, regarded as extensions of the Incarnation, hallowed human life and the created (and creative) order. A phrase in Eliot's third "Ariel" poem, the beautiful "Marina" (1930), succinctly captures an aspect of this idea when the poet refers with gratitude to the experience of "grace dissolved in place." He experiences this through a keen joy in the natural world, communicated through the senses: "the scent of pine" and "the woodthrush singing through the fog."

Such an intersection of the timeless with the spatio-temporal order, which is at the heart of the Christian and Christmas mystery of the Incarnation, was the source of Eliot's repeated insistence on the need to be aware of and respond to moments of transcendence. As he represents them, they are unbidden, fleeting and as likely as not to be given to human beings in the course of their ordinary daily life. They can be experienced in any situation or place: "at the sea jaws, / Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city" (as he writes in the last Quartet, "Little Gidding"). He called these epiphanies "still points" in the midst of our turning and - as he remarked with unimagined prescience - "twittering" world. In writing about such moments, especially in Four Quartets, Eliot produces some of his loveliest and most moving descriptive verse (from "The Dry Salvages"):

the moment in and out of time, The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight, The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply That it is not heard at all, but you are the music While the music lasts.

In "Journey of the Magi," however, Eliot also recognises the seductive allure of the sensuous world, bereft of such spiritual inspiration and consolation. Rather than facilitating the religious quest for transcendence, this can inhibit and frustrate it. Astutely, Eliot writes as powerfully about such non-redemptive beauty, as he does about the epiphanies that take us beyond the constraints of mortality, even as they are rooted in spatio-temporality. The Magi, journeying to the Christ-child, reflect that:

We regretted The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces, And the silken girls bringing sherbet.

In the later poem, Ash-Wednesday (1930), the penitent has a similarly delicious vision of the pagan world which he must nonetheless renounce as he arduously climbs the stairway of perfection:

The hawthorn blossom and a pasture scene The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute. Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown, Lilac and brown hair ...

These, not surprisingly, would distract him on his spiritual quest: "Lord, I am not worthy," he confesses, in quotation from the text of the Mass, "but speak the word only."

We see here a recurring theme of Eliot's poetry: the difficulty of the spiritual life (perhaps especially in the post-Christian twentieth century) and how unsatisfactory and insufficient are notions of absolute conversion to an unquestioned truth in countering modern scepticism and secularism. The best one can hope for, Eliot wrote in the Quartets, are:

hints and guesses, Hints followed by guesses; and the rest Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.

This is why his worldly-wise Magi are introduced in bleak mid-winter in the midst of difficult journeying. Indeed, Eliot begins the poem in a complaint from one of them, adapted from a seventeenth-century sermon on the Nativity by Bishop Lancelot Andrewes:

"A cold coming we had of it, Just the worst time of the year For a journey, and such a long journey ..."

When we remember that this is Eliot's very first Christian utterance in poetry, it is striking to note the emphatic negativity of the language. While the poem eventually moves to the Nativity scene (but, even there, ambiguity dominates), it is introduced with a strong sense of the via negativa of the Christian's pilgrimage. Most importantly, we recognise that these wise men, while recalling the biblical figures who were drawn to the baby at Bethlehem, are more tellingly interpreted as the worldly-wise men of modern life - people like Eliot himself, indeed - who must struggle to reclaim the experience of faith and cannot even be sure of the character or implications of that experience when they have had it.

His Magi travel backwards through time, past the scene of suffering at the crucifixion (dimly recognised here as "three trees on the low sky"), to the newborn Christ-child. It is an encounter with the source of faith - "it was (you may say) satisfactory," they note flatly - apprehended after intense and protracted personal and universal suffering, attended by the ever-present temptations of the flesh and in the face of contemporary, irreligious derision: "with the voices ringing in our ears, saying / That this was all folly." Eliot's embrace of orthodox Christian belief and practice was regarded as a betrayal by many of his friends and literary associates in these years, such as members of the Bloomsbury Group. Virginia Woolf, for example, was appalled by it.

The Magi return from their encounter with the Incarnation to a now-alien people "clutching their gods." Incompleteness closes the poem as a solitary Magus yearns for a further dying to worldliness: "I should be glad of another death."

For all its negativity, we note that for the first time in the corpus of Eliot's work there is at least and at last the sense that the journey (a common motif in his writing, from the beginning) is not absolutely pointless. Now it has become a challenging experience, with a destination producing something other than despair. The Magi of 1927 are not the "Hollow Men" of 1925. And we have moved a long way from J. Alfred Prufrock's pointless, directionless search for meaning.

For all its difficulty, uncertainty and lack of final resolution, the Magi's quest is undeniably focused on the Lord's birth. The affirmation of that event and the divine presence there indicates at least the possibility of new life. This is most powerfully registered in the Magi's descent into "a temperate valley, / Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation," where they encounter "a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness." Prior to this, the dominant symbolism in Eliot's poetry - most famously in The Waste Land of 1922 - was of a desert place, bereft of regeneration. For the first time in his work, we come to a domain of fertility and the glad promise of futurity, instinct with rejuvenation, conquering the darkness of sin and - similarly symbolically, but also sacramentally - with "the running stream." This speaks of the new life of baptism and stands in sharp contrast to the landscape of The Waste Land where there "is no water."

In the second, Christian half of his life and career, Eliot writes most splendidly, in his descriptive mode, about water. One of the Quartets, "The Dry Salvages," is devoted to that element, as Eliot remembers it affectionately from his younger days in America, growing up by the Mississippi in St. Louis and on the Atlantic coast, off Massachusetts, where he was a keen sailor as a boy. Nowhere is this imagery more beautiful than in that other poem specifically devoted to water and the sea, "Marina" (as its title indicates, recalling the Latin adjective). The work summons Shakespeare's play, Pericles, where the man of the title, long believing his daughter to have been drowned at sea as a baby, now has her miraculously restored to him in her womanhood. Eliot regarded this reunion as one of the great "recognition scenes" in literature and in the context of what he called "a very great play." They see one another, at this moment of recognition and revelation (he wrote) "in a light more than that of day." Pericles is brought to a knowledge of a truth beyond the limitations of this mortal world and its appearances. Eliot registers this experience of new life in lines that need no exegesis:

This form, this face, this life Living to live in a world of time beyond me: let me Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken, The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.

Barry Spurr is Professor of Poetry and Poetics in the University of Sydney. His most recent book is "Anglo-Catholic in Religion": T.S. Eliot and Christianity.