Notesale: Turn your study into money

Document Preview

Extracts from the notes are below, to see the PDF you'll receive please use the links above

---

MODERNISM IN LITERATURE: Cultural movement that refers to the first half of the
20th century

1910s-1920s  REVOLUTIONARY PHASE  the
beginning of a new movement is always more
revolutionary than the later development of the
movement itself because a break with whatever has
been done in the past is needed

1930s-1940s  EXPERIMENTATION +
EXPLORATION of new ideas and techniques

o Historical Background Timeline: p
...
266 to p
...
280)
Imagism – Ezra Pound
W
...
Yeats
T
...
Eliot
War poetry: concentrated just on the perception of the description of the war
experience in their works
...
In the case of WW1, the feelings derived from trench
war)

Recurrent themes:
o ABOLITION OF THE PAST (NEWNESS)  Especially in the revolutionary phase refers
to the abolition of the past and a new idea of what is new, of whatever is considered
innovation, revision of past values
...
S
...
The reaction of writers, poets, artists was to
describe this feeling of uneasiness, desolation, discomfort, disorientation in their works (with regard
to Yeats and Eliot)
The early phase of Modernism and the romantic movement in England can be related to each other
because they both originated in a phase of intellectual and social change
...

Modernist artists and writers need a cultural readjustment with the past
...

Similarly to Romanticism, which also produced some radical changes in the language used
(Wordsworth pretended to be using the language really used by men), poets and artists in the early
20th century will have to adapt their linguistic choices to the new realities they feel they have to
describe, as well as to the message they need to convey through their works
...
Narrative style in Mrs Dalloway and Dubliners  Realistic
elements in the descriptions of places and situations, but always interfused with a variety of
symbolic meanings that each situation and place acquires in the general pattern of the story
...
The poem by W
...
Yeats The centre
cannot hold (The second coming) represents the expression of this feeling
...
There are
no moral values to refer to (not only with regard to literature, but also to ordinary people)
...
Yeats finds the solution to
the desolation of society in the world of arts (≈Keats and, in a way, to Oscar Wilde), whereas Eliot
finds it thanks to religion and his spiritual faith

IMAGISM
Ezra Pound
He was born in 1885 and was of American origin, but his family was of English descent , which
justifies his fascination towards European culture
...
He also lived in London and his thoughts about poetry both influenced Yeats and Eliot

(production always interrelated to each other  triangle)
...
He lived in Rapallo, where he stayed for 24 years
...
He then returned to the U
...
because
he had a trial there (he had been accused of treason, which is the reason he was put in a
concentration camp)
...
C
...
During this period, he was always helped by many artists and last,
when he was finally released, he came back to Italy and died in Venice in 1972
...

Imagism implies that Ezra believed in a one-image poem (poem based just on one image)
...

Ezra refers to the Japanese tradition
...
It is the
presentation of this complex which gives a sense of
sudden liberation and a sense of freedom from both
time limits and space limits
...
The images poets (or one-image
poem) should use either no ornament or a good
ornament
The third important element is to avoid abstraction

The one-image poem by Ezra Pound

In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough

Lack of syntax
Avoidance of development: it is in
the mind of the poet, but not
expressed in words
No verbs, no connections
Colour is basic to the poem
Symbolic meaning of words

Petals: heart of the poem

Pound has the memory in
his mind of the apparition
of many beautiful faces and
he reproduces it years after
in this poem
These: the poet refers to
the uniqueness and beauty
of some faces he has
These
impressed in his mind
...
physical
and emotional perception

All these elements make this poem
Pleasant to read, but quite complex to
understand

Crowd
related to the title: in a station of
the metro you are likely to find
yourself in a crowd

The rules that he used in his oneimage poems will become
patrimony of the poems of the 20th
century:
 Attention towards one image
 Symbolic meaning of words

The sweetness of the image (the apparition of these beautiful
faces) clashes with the dreariness, impersonal characteristic of
the atmosphere and the movement in a metro station
...

Wet implies something that is alive  a living entity
Black: it reminds of the atmosphere of the metro station and a feeling of
inadequacy in spite of the positive apparition of the faces

These faces are defined as petals
...


p
...
He was an Irish writer as Joyce and Oscar Wilde
He was born in 1865 and died in 1939 in France
...
He was a man deeply involved in the Irish political life and he
was also fond of theatre
...
He
married an actress, Maud Gonne, and they worked together in the Irish National Theatre
...

In 1923, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature
...

In 1933, he wrote The Winding Stair
Easter 1916  his vision of history
The titles are important to understand his theory of poetry
...

The literary production of Yeats introduces some revolutionary ideas and new themes, but it owes
quite a lot to the previous literary production
...
EARLY PERIOD: The Lake Isle of Innisfree
...
MIDDLE PERIOD: The Wild Swans at Coole

Even in other artists of the time, the general idea is to reject whatever is new basis and new
certainties for mankind
...
As Joyce elaborated his mythical method according to which there
is a set of myths on which modernity is built, the same happens with Elliot and Yeats
3
...
The movement of each gyre is rotating with a movement forward
...
The movement of the second jyre implies penetrating into the first one
...
Y
...
The jyre which for Y
...
The jyre which started 2000 years later
represents the beginning of bitter agony  We are now immersed in an age of confusion,
unbalance
...
so he believes that this period represents the beginning of this second jyre
...


THE LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE
It reminds of Wordsworth
...
The name of the Isle mentioned is Innisfree  It suggests the
idea of inner freedom
...
There he
will build a simple place for himself (a cabin) where to find shelter and protection, and he will live
in very simple things: nine bean-rows, a honey-bee
...

The 2nd, 3rd and 4th lines present liquid sounds, which are sweet
2nd stanza: He will have peace there and he realizes that peace arrives gradually in the hearts of
people
...
The 2nd is the glimmer (a bird:
fanello) movement of wings at night
...


3rd stanza: It focuses on the poet finding himself not on the Isle, but in London, in Fleet Street
...
“I hear” implies physical perception (focus on auditory perception)
...
is not immersed in the nature described in the previous stanzas, but he finds himself on the
streets of London or on the grey pavements
...

Introduction to the poem
The poem combines 2 different elements:




The poet’s love for Henry David Thoreau, an American writer who experienced a life of
solitude in the woods
...
Y
...
He had this desire in his
teens
...
He explains what stimulates this
memory: he is front of a shop window and he sees a fountain with a tinkle of water and on
top of it a little ball
...
(still quite romantic)
Yeats refers to an experience he had at Coole
...
Yeats describes the effects that the memory of the swans by the lake, which
makes him live this experience a second time, will cause in him
...
The first visit at Coole was 19 years before he writes the poem
and he remembers that there were 59 swans by the lake
...

The very end of the poem is when the swans have that mystery and beauty in themselves which he
cannot explain
...
The swans caused pleasure to the poet and the other human beings
...
Human beings, instead, grow older
...
Here, the
poem closes with a question  We don’t know whether he is already able to give an answer to

himself, but probably not yet
...

In the second stanza, when the poet refers to the wings of the swans, the image of the wheeling
movement is connected to the movements of the gyres which for Y
...
is building also the conditions on which he will later develop his theory of history,
being immersed in his existential belief
...

He does not only represent the vision of the swan, but each sight is enriched with the auditory
elements: the wings of the swans are clamorous because they make the wind produce sounds
...
The poet is sad because he is getting older
and doesn’t find a way out in nature or memory, instead Wordsworth was sad because he was losing
the energy he had when he was a boy and for him nature was all in all
...


THE SECOND COMING, 1919
It is a poem about the war and in which the poet reveals that something is happening in the history
of man: as the title suggests there will be a second coming
...

After Russian revolution, during WW1, Eastern Rising in 1916
The falcon and the falconer represent mankind and authority
...
The centre cannot hold
anymore
...
He uses his symbolic imagery in the poem,
the gyre is widening, if there is no more connection there is mere anarchy loose upon the world
...
Everywhere the sense of innocence is
drowned
...
War is a tide because
it submerges everything
...

The poet denounces was and its consequences on ordinary people: he describes a war in symbolic
terms completely different from how the war poets did in their works
...
The new generations find themselves in an era of total
confusion, anarchy, with the loss of any form of authority and no communication between the
source of power (governments) and ordinary beings
...
He says that there is something he can now reveal: he opens the stanza
stating that a second coming is about to come
...

Exclamation mark  Symbol of the intensity of this formal announcement by the poet, but soon
after it we perceive from these lines that the second coming is not expected to be a positive one as
the first one
Spiritual Mundi  For Yeats represents the Great Memory, which troubles the sight of the poet
He describes the setting where the second coming will take place: desert, in the distance he
perceives a shape (lifeless shape) with a lion body and the head of a man  Sphynx- like image
that has an expression in its face is blank and pitiless
...
17Reel of the birds also referring to the movement of the gyre
As soon as the poet perceives this shape, there is darkness again  The 2nd coming hasn’t brought
light with it, it’s not a real revelation, but only the anticipation of sth dreadful which will menace
the life of ordinary people
20 centuries of stony sleep: gyre
Rocking cradle  Symbolic  Cradle of Christ
These 20 centuries have brought men to this chrisis and everything moved from the rocking cradle,
the image of Christ
But now it is time for this rough beast to appear (the beast is what was previously referred to as a
shape)
Bethlehem rocking cradle and second coming  Remind of the coming of Christ hich Yeats
reinterprets imagining a new coming which will imply a moment of anarchy, confusion and
disintegration of everything around him
This is the one poem which, according to the critics, can be interpreted in two different ways:
The 1st stanza can be read as an example of war poetry  The poet analyses the effects that the war
had on the minds of the people of the early 20th century
The 2nd is more a prophetic vision of how the reality of people will change because of all the
historical events of the early 20th century
...
D
...
The city was also the capital of the Eastern
Roman Empire, so it represented for him the center of European Western and Eastern culture (a
fusion)
...

First he describes the reality in which he lives, then the reality he aspires to
...

In this poem, he breaks the reality he perceives around himself and gradually cuts it into pieces to
reconstitute one in a more symbolic way which will grant him the possibility of overcoming the
physical limits and to find a new spiritual dimension totally immersed in the beauty of art, in which
the past, the present and the future will coexist (in just one single element there is everything)
After the poem, he wrote another: Byzantium  metaphysical interpretation, really hard to interpret
and deciphrate
That is no country for old men  He says there is no more place for old people in Ireland and
Europe, so he looks for a safe harbor for himself
...
And yet the
poet introduces images which embody the idea of fertility of life (salmon-falls, mackerel-crowded

seas, fish, flesh of fowl – selvaggina – live all summer long
...
Caught in the central music 
Not only perceived by the physical ear, but by the soul too – ordinary people ignore
The one thing which will never grow old is the intellect, which can produce real monuments
From the 1st line in which he was worrying about aging, now he says that intellect is unaging and
will be the basis for something doomed to be eternal
...

What can save men from aging is their own hope and their ability to start singing (artistic
expression  singing can help them overcome their physical aging) for every single tatter they
have in their dress and create monuments that are beautiful
...
Since he has understood that the intellect only can help him,
he has come to Byzantium  Come means that he is already there, therefore the process of
awareness has already started
3rd and 4th stanzas seem to lose the physical contact between the poet and the physical reality of the
wholly city
...
He says “ gather me into
the artifice of eternity”  Y
...
Once
again, he seems to invite and involve all these pieces of art to rotate in a gyre
The 4th stanza: he is out of nature
...
He says that now he can regain his bodily form, but at this point it will be
the fusion of what he was before (what is past), of what he is now (the process of having become a
piece of art) and what he will be now that he is an artifice of eternity and completely out of nature
This is the compromise between his physical, intellectual and spiritual forms
...
It was the ,PST important party which advocated total independence
from Britain
...
In these election
this party won, except in Ulster
...
Instead they decided to meet in the Dail, the Irish parliament, to announce
that Ireland was a republic totally independent from Britain
...
The parties leading the war were the IRA (Irish Republican Army) and the
Sinn Fein
...
Northern Ireland remained British
The Anglo-Irish treaty was not considered totally satisfactory because the power of Britain was still
recognized, so in 1922 a civil war started
...
A more peaceful situation started in 1932 with a
new Prime minister, Eamon de Valera, who was a survivor of the Easter Rising
...

They tried to take possession of some key buildings in Dublin like the post office
...

This rebellion derives from 1886 when there was the first bill granting home rule (independence
from Britain), this bill was rejected from the British Parliament
...

After this first attempt there were two more bills granting home rule to Ireland but they were again
rejected
...

In Ireland the political party that promoted the political freedom of Ireland was “Sinn Fein” which
meant “ourselves alone”
...

The members of parliament elected in Ireland decided to meet in Dail (the Irish parliament) instead
of meeting in the British parliament because they wanted to declare that Ireland was totally
independent from Britain and it was a Republic: the war of independence started and the party
leading this war “IRA” (Irish republic army) and again “Sinn Fein”
...

This fact was not considered to be totally satisfactory because the power of Britain was still
recognized so in 1922 a civil war started and during it one of the parties called “the irregulars” was
finally defeated in 1931 and in 1932 a more peacefully situation started with the election of a new
first minster: Eamon de Valera who became the founder of the Republic of Ireland (EIRE) officially
created in 1937
...

In the fourth and fifth stanzas (the 5th closes with the same sort of refrain of stanzas 1 & 3)
...
The focus is therefore also on the emotional
involvement of all these people and in the following stanza there is a statement which is a sort of

rhetorical idea that a sacrifice (of so many deaths) could make a stone of a heart, but actually this is
not going to happen, because the poet expresses in the final stanza the idea of a change which is not
completely positive, as it involved so many negative facts, but a change that is necessary and that
implies a long path before Ireland gets to a more peaceful situation
...
These folks are probably happy to be off work,
so they come with "vivid faces" from wherever they work, whether it's behind a "desk" or "counter"
at a store among some grey old houses
...

•
When he says “All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born” he refers to
the same theme of “the second coming” so something new but terrible is born
...
In rising,
beautiful women are grown shrewd
...
They sacrificed their
lives and Yeats included them in his song without prejudice or rancour
...
Their will to meet death in a common cause made them heroes, and inspire Yeats to sing in
their honor
...
But even this man rose to the
occasion and attended a tragic dignity by his part in the Easter Rising

ELIOT

He was a poet, essayist, dramatist of American origin
...
Cosmopolitan attitude to culture: he absorbed part of the
American cultural heritage and he transported it into the European panorama and he enriched his
production with a bit of everything
...

The poem we analyse are related to the first phase>

- the love song of J
...

- Journey of the Magi, a shorter dramatic monologue
...

In Yates production, Sailing to Byzantium (last poem read) also represents a new belief in life and a
new dimension in life (eternity of art)
...

Need of both poets to have new foundation to their own existence and to give certainty to other
human beings
...

Objective correlative
An object reminds the person of an emotion and it provokes in that specific situation the reexperience of emotion or any emotional reaction connected to the object (epiphany, moment of
being)
...
Objective because it relates to something that can be physically perceived
...
These poets were
not understood nor appreciated in their own time
...

They shocked and amazed the reader by combining discordant images or expression from different
fields of knowledge
...
So he had this dissociated sensibility between the two level of
perception of reality
...
Conversion
between thought and feelings
...
In reality the author and his personality, needs, aspirations are often part of what they
produce
...
What Eliot tries to obtain is to enhance the
imagination through the sound of poetry, combining what is new and innovating with what belongs
to past traditions (also in Joyce)
...
They need values to rely on and to build something new from
themselves, they can’t find these values in the present, so they look for them in the past
...

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone
...
You cannot value him alone; you must
set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead
...
The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not
onesided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens
simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it
...
The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist
after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and
so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this
is conformity between the old and the new
...
And the poet who is aware of this will be
aware of great difficulties and responsibilities
...
I say judged, not amputated, by them; not judged to be as good as, or worse or better than, the
dead; and certainly not judged by the canons of dead critics
...
To conform merely would be for the new work not
really to conform at all; it would not be new, and would therefore not be a work of art
...
We say: it appears to conform, and is perhaps individual, or it appears
individual, and many conform; but we are hardly likely to find that it is one and not the other
...
The reader gives a subjective interpretation to
the piece of art
...
Alfred Prufrock) and The Hollow Men, which convey the sense of sterility and desolation in
the mind of the poet
...
His masterpiece is The Wasteland, a very long poem divided
into 5 parts and really complicated
...
ALFRED PRUFROCK
Prufrock  Eliot chooses this name by chance
...
Prutrock could be any man and the alter ego of the poem
himself
...
It is a feeling that the poet wishes he could live in
first person
Cultural intensity characterizes in all of his poems
...
The focus is on communicating one’s
thoughts and not worrying about the reactions of other people
...

Let us go then  then implies that the talk has been going on for some time
...
Even with Joyce the focus was always on the public and private side of each
individual and the way each person relates themselves to the other members of society
...
These may be pubs in England  all of these are
not exclusive places

A tedious argument  boring and intricate at the same time
These thoughts and streets lead you to an overwhelming question  Prufrock’s existential question
that everybody has, but which he says not to ask
...
He is probably paying a
visit to some place (a house in which there is a party)
Refrain
He describes a room in which there are some women with long and elegant skirts who walk through
the room and talk about Michelangelo
...

2nd stanza
He describes the house from the outside: yellow fog and smoke which implies ambiguity, mystery
covering the house, they imprison people inside
...
The smoke and the fog
penetrate the evening with their yellowish house, their movements around the house are described
...
This description ends exactly as it started and the theme of time is
introduced
...
Eliot expresses
his feeling for not being always accepted for what he is
...

Time for you and time for me  reference to a possible love song
There is time to do something in life, since life is made up of a sequence of actions and thoughts,
but there will also be time for a 100 indecisions, visions and revisions  there seems to be no
certainty for Prufrock
...
When do we have time for all this? Before the taling
of a toast and tea  reference to the trivial pleasant things of everybody’s everyday life
...
It is a fall in the tone  Eliot first keeps the read focused on
serious things, but soon after he breaks these tensions
...

3rd stanza
Then the poet states that there will be time to wonder, to question other people
...
It is the first question he asks himself
...
In
Hamlet (To be or not to be), there is the same act: should I act and kill Claudius or not? He is
becoming bold, others will notice it and make unpleasant comments about it
...
Other critics say that through
this poem it is possible to understand the English fashion of the 20th century
...

Do I dare disturb the universe, make my voice heard?  this may be the overwhelming question,
But his answer is that any minute can change our life and what we have decided can be reversed
very quickly, therefore that’s his answer
...

He has known the evenings, mornings, afternoons  three phases of the day
...
Importance of
life measured through trivial things
So how should I presume (osare)? Third question, third step
...
There is a further movement towards acting, making something
...
When he finds himself in such cathegory and he is standing on a pin (chiodo,
spillo  suffering) and he cannot move, because they are looking at him and have made him into
something which he is not
...
There seems to be no
escape from this prison
...

6th stanza
Then he focuses their arms: bare (with no hair on them) but actually there are some hairs that show
up in the lamplight
...
He asks himself why he has such vane thought and if it a perfume that has stimulated
such thought
...
He seems to be about to tell something to
us
...
He says no and compares himself to a crab walking
backwards in the same way as he had decided to descend the stairs and move back
...


8th stanza
By saying “I am afraid”, Prufrock reveals something about himself and he is not afraid to do so
...
This may be the beginning of something new
...

After tea and cakes and ices  usual things, but equally important
He asks himself is h should be strong something to reach a moment of chiris, cause it emplies doing
something out of an act of courage
...
The
moment of his success has disappeared and even the eternal Footman (maggiordomo) has held his
coat soggignando a lui
...
The eternal Footman may be the one he
met at the house entrance
...
compares himself to some heroic figures, but he can’t reveal any truth
...

He is about to say something, but he is not Lazarus, nor is he a prophet, so he is not ready to say
anything
...


10th stanza
It is equally important to be brave enough and say that this is not what you meant
...


11th stanza
Prufrock keeps wondering if he could have done that, been worth of it
...
He cannot idenitify himself as Hamlet (tormented by being or not being) because
at the end he is pushed to action by the ghost of hisfather
...
Because of his insane condition, he can know and reveal the truth
to others
...
Prufrock is very confused, he asks himself if the should dear to eat a
peach, which may mean to dear to disturb the universe
...
But not even the mermaids will sing for him
...

12th stanza
Now there is a change from the I speaking and We have lingered in the chambers of the sea  all
this questioning, walking, philosophical speculation about that the others may think or say of him
and his feelings of inadequacy, all of it has taken place until he has felt human voices that awaken
you
...
He is saying that he has looked for a way
out, but that all of us drown  Prufrockk (and Eliot) is not ready yet to find a solution to that sense
of desolation and ariditiy that characterizes the human condition
...


THE HOLLOW MEN
It is an extension of the Wasteland, although it is shorter
...
The second is part of the British culture
...
Mistah Kurtz-he dead  Exclamation of the people living in Africa (Mistah); Kurtz is an
English trader who moved to Africa, got used to the African lifestyle and felt immersed in
this atmosphere, but he is anyways a colonizer, a white man invading another country
(Conrad’s novel is set in Congo
...
The heart of Africa =
heart of darkness, but Marlow will never know Kurtz because he is dead
...
refers to (the author doesn’t reveal it)
...
has become aware of
the horror committed by white people on the lives of black people
...
The
hollow men, the protagonists of his poem, are a bit like K
...
K
...

2
...

Hollow means “vuoto”  men with spiritual void inside them

1st section

In line 14, the hollow men refer to the other Kingdom of death
...
One idea is the physical death, the other idea is
that sometimes people live in a reality that to them is life, but this life is instead a sort of spiritual
death for them
...

The hollow men at the beginning declare they are empty, but stuffed
...
They whisper together and the stanza conveys a sad image
...
They are not violent souls nor lost, but they are just hollow
and stuffed
...
These images do not present any soul and the starts themselves are
fading
...
In this reality, there can be no
love
...

Third section neither is there a possibility to perceive reality as it is
...
The only hope that they have is to see the perpetual star multifoliate
rose (reference to Dante)
...

The overall theme can also be how communication fails in the reality described by the poets, which
is not too far from what the poet had expressed through the character of Prufrock
...
The feeling of suspension,
emptiness, indecision which characterizes the stanzas from the Hollow Men is confirmed in the
conclusion (5th section)
...
The nursery rhyme changed by Eliot says: here we go around the prickly pear (…) at 5 o’clock
in the morning
...
We are immersed in a reality where there is no light (Falls the shadow), therefore
no hope of regeneration
...
Conception-creation; emotion-response; desire-spasm; potency-existence;
essence-descent
...

Then he introduces another nursery rhyme: this is the way the world ends (x3)
...
It talks about a journey, but there is a similar idea to the poem
of Prufrock, who walks through the streets of London to a place that is not essential, but that to him
meets to walk somewhere, to meet people, to cope with various realities
...
The
Magi are the three magi (magus: singular)
...

In the first part, there is a description of the natural environment, of the conditions in which
this journey starts
...

The language is not difficult, what makes it quite hard to follow is its philosophical speculation (it
is not only a mere description, like Prufrock)
...

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter
...

There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet
...
This sense of regret, however,
will later be overcome by the experience they are
about to live
...


A hard time we had of it
...


Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the
darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow
...

But there was no information, and so we continued
And arriving at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you might say) satisfactory
...

o They feel as if they heard voices telling them
that what they are doing is absurd
...

Water = life, vitality, purification
Three trees = remind of the three crosses on the low
sky
...
They keep going
because they know they have to arrive on time for the
occasion
...

“You might say”:
o involves the ideal silence audience of any
dramatic monologue
o the experience becomes universal
The magus is back to their present life
...


All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt
...

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods
...


o He would repeat this journey again
o Breaking of the language (like the Hollow
Men)  the magus doesn’t need to reveal
explicitly his feelings, he only needs a few
words to do so
...
Strangely enough, the poet (and
the magus) closes the poem with the word
Death  Death of Christ meaning salvation for us all
is worth it
...

Their beliefs have changed when they go back to life,
but this change was worth it

---