Welcome to 2026! But before we celebrate too hard, it’s important to reflect on what a new year actually is. Are we going to keep repeating the same cycles we always have? Are we going to go on making the same mistakes? Or are we going to recognize that Christmas is the date that marks the revolution in our hearts, and New Years an opportunity to set that change in place? GK Chesterton has a choice adventure story in today’s poem that gets to the heart of what a change looks and feels like.

In this video, I talk about T.S. Eliot’s 1927 poem, “The Journey of the Magi.” Dashed off in just forty-five minutes, Eliot’s poem looks at the Christmas miracle from the perspective of the Magi, now grown old and full of years. In the midst of the Christmas season, we can forget that the Birth was not just the beginning of a new world, but the ending of the old. What must it be like, Eliot asks, to live in the knowledge you are between two worlds, having outlived the old, and unprepared for the new?

In this video, I talk about how Keats manages to find enchantment everywhere he looks: in nature, old books, the songs of birds, or here, on a Greek vessel which he’d read about in a magazine. Enchantment, however, is never a simple matter with Keats, who knows well that the spells Fancy draws can be fatal as well as fruitful. Be that as it may, Keats recognizes that enchantment, like beauty, fills and revives a world ever crouching towards death, and it is for this reason, he celebrates beauty wherever he finds it.