Last lines of ' The Waste Land'

1. Shantih Shantih
Shantih in ‘The
Waste Land’.
JETHAVA NIDHI

2. Table of content
 This presentation is about ‘ The Waste Land’
 Last lines
 Upanishad
 Description of word Shantih

3. Prepared by :- Nidhi Jethava
Batch :- 20-22 MKBU English Department
Paper :- 106 , 20th Century Literature I
Roll Number :- 13
Enrollment Number :- 30692064200009
Email Id :- jethavanidhi8@gamil.com

4. Introduction
 Published in 1922
 The most important poem of the 20th
century.
 Divided into five parts
 Collage of various images
 Consist allusions and myths
 Poem opens with lines “ April is the
cruellest month.”

5. About the poem
 The poem ‘ The Waste land ‘ is collage
of various images.
 1. The Burial of Death
 2. A Game of Chess
 3. The Fire sermon
 4. Death by Water
 5. What the Thunder Said.
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6. What does "Shantih shantih
shantih" mean?
 Eliot uses so many allusions and
myths in ‘The waste land’.
 In the final part of the poem he gives
the refresh of Upanishad.
 "Shantih, shantih, shantih" literally
means "inner peace" in Sanskrit.
 The words are uttered at the end of
prayers in the Upanishads, a series of
Hindu religious texts.
 In Christian terms it means a gift that
comes to us from the grace of God.

8. * On reading the mantra it is clear that
it is a universal prayer for peace. When
we recite the mantra we pray for peace
on all – the universe, space, earth, water,
vegetation, people, even God and last of
all onto self. We pray for strengthening of
peace, goodness and happiness.

9. Shantih in ‘The Waste Land’
 That Eliot commanded amore than
ordinary understanding of the Shantih
mantra is evidenced by his note.
 Eliot's note recognizes only the
convention that they must, ideally,
end so. Inconsistent with this shrewd
recognition, however, is the poet's
seemingly intentional voidance of Om
in the last line of The Waste Land. As a
poet whose ear was ever so finely
attuned to the resonances of the
Word, Eliot could hardly have missed
the mystical nuances of the Hindu
Word.

10.  The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad which
provides the poem's ultimate
"message" commences with Om, a
detail which Eliot is not likely to have
overlooked.
 Chandogya-Upanishad, opens with a
detailed account of Om and its
mystical import.
 It’s a symbol of supreme.

11. Ultimate meaning of shnatihi in ‘ The
Waste Land.’
 Eliot's translation of "shantih" (which,
incidentally, he calls "feeble" in his note
to the first edition of the poem) as
"peace which passeth [all]
understanding" therefore assumes an
ominously literal meaning.
 The vanity of uttering "shantih" in The
Waste Land, in other words, compares
with that of the wise men of Judah
whom the Lord rebukes for having
"healed the hurt of the daughter of my
people slightly, saying, Peace, peace;
when there is no peace. ( Jeremiah 8: i i.
)

12. Citation
 A Reader's Guide to T S. Eliot: A Poem-by-Poem Analysis (London: Thames and Hudson, I955), p-
I54.
 American Literature, Volume 6i, Number 4, December I989. Copyright C) I989 by the Duke
University Press.
 Eliot, T S, and Frank Kermode. The Waste Land and Other Poems. New York, N.Y., U.S.A:
Penguin Books, 1998. Print.
 Kearns seems to imply this when she remarks that the deletion of On "represents, among other
things, the modern dilemma of the logos.
 Of the eighteen "Principal Upanishads" S. Radhakrishnan has translated and edited, only the
text of Taittiriya Upanishad incorporates the Santih mantra at the beginning. That all the
Upanishads must end with the recitation of the mantra is a convention Vedic scholars observe
universally, whether the mantra forms part of the Upanishadic text or not.
 The Principal Upanishads, trans. and ed. S. Radhakrishnan (I953; London: George Allen & Unwin,
1974), pp. 337-38.
 T. S. Eliot and Indic Traditions: A Study in Poetry and Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
I987), p. 229.
 " T. S. Eliot, "Notes on the Waste Land" in The Waste Land and Other Poems (New York:
Harcourt, Brace & World, 1930), p. 54. 9