ABSTRACT
English is not usually thought of as a musical language. Italian is thought of as a musical language; Nevertheless, without wishing to enter into any controversy about the authority or otherwise of a poet's own reading of his work, the fact that a recording of T. S. Eliot reading "Journey of the Magi" is available, and that Benjamin Britten set this poem to music as Canticle IV, provides an opportunity to compare a poet's reading with a composer's setting of the same text. This chapter compares an analysis of Eliot's stress and intonation with Britten's score. It also compares the stress patterns of the reading with the musical rhythm, and the intonation patterns with the melodic line. This raises problems relating to the cohesion of the text, which are studied from the point of view of the semantic chains present in the poem and its thematic structure. The chapter considers how this thematic structure is treated in Britten's setting.
