Shantih, Shantih, Shantih: the peace that passes all understanding
Thomas Stearns Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948 for his outstanding contribution to the world of poetry today. One of his pioneering works is The Wasteland. For Eliot, the wasteland symbolizes that area of human life where men exist without guiding faith, where men have turned their backs on spiritual enlightenment, and the title points to this dilemma.
The poem, divided into five parts, is thus fragmented, lacks logical continuity and temporal sequence, and is a projection of the oscillations and psychological conflicts that ravaged the soul of man at the beginning of the 20th century (the situation is no different today). Eliot felt that Western civilization had become mechanical, dull, and dehumanized. Corruption, degeneration, and stark materialism were rampant. In this broken and fragmented world, nothing could be integrated.
Even though the poem is an irregular kaleidoscopic entity, it is held together only in the all-encompassing prophetic vision of Tiresias, the bisexual blind seer of ancient Greek tragedy, and what Tiresias sees is the substance of the entire poem. Psychologically speaking, it is the consciousness of humanity. As a symbol of the past that still survives in the present, the old Tiresias, “with his wrinkled female breast” has renounced everything that is represented in the ugly scene of the contemporary world.
He transcends the barrier of time and place with quick flashes embracing with his empty gaze, now a scene in the present – the images of “the ruins of London Bridge falling”, a “taxi throbbing and waiting”, to personify the life of an immoral and lascivious typist of the 20th century, as well as of the past – Dante’s hell, Cleopatra’s love game, Elizabeth, and reveals in our mental image the enormity of the sin committed by the mythical king Oedipus of Thebes – the drought – and – on mounted land – in his rape of his mother Jocasta, and of the need to purify the soul of the sinner through suffering.
In The Wasteland, the images and symbols are broadly divided into two categories: the images taken from the common aspects of urban life but raised to great intensity (the image of the throbbing taxi), and the symbols of myth, nature and nature. religion, which focus on the theme of death and rebirth. Thus, drought is a symbol of spiritual dryness and the rain of spiritual fertility. However, certain objects can symbolize two opposing ideas depending on their functions. Thus, water is, on the one hand, a symbol of creation, of life and growth, of purification and transformation, in the form of a river or sea and, on the other hand, it also destroys life and property. Similarly, fire, as a destructive agent, is a symbol of lust that consumes a person to a state of “living death”; but fire, like the sacred flame on the altar, is also a symbol of inspiration, enlightenment, and spiritual exaltation. Eliot constantly plays with ambivalent images.
From postwar European society, its spiritual sterility is conveyed by the symbol of a stony and barren soil. The idea of a stalemate, that life reaches a dead end, is conveyed by the symbol of the “chess game.” The idea of life as a senseless, dull and languid movement in a narrow circle is conveyed by the image “we are living in an alley of rats where the dead lost their bones.” The idea is reinforced by images of misery and vulgarity, for example, the river sweats oil and tar and carries with its current the dirty cargo of empty bottles, cigarette butts, silk scarves and other testimonies of summer parties and sexual encounters between nymphs of the city and their casual lovers.
The theme of sterility, decay, and death is woven into the quest for life and resurrection that Eliot found in the Holy Grail legend and other anthropological myths, with a sprinkling of Christian, Buddhist, and Hindu religious analogies, and the feeling of liberation from this state and of freedom is conveyed by the image of a ship gliding smoothly under the expert hand, God, who balances all the setbacks that man has made in the stupid belief of his superiority and, therefore, of his self-aggrandizement .
The Wasteland is Eliot’s spiritual autobiography, his search through the garbage heap of modern culture in search of an integrating principle, just as he would with Pilgrim’s Progress (From this world to what is to come, by John Bunyan) . Eliot’s vision moves back and forth with an incessant back and forth motion over legend, belief, and symbol. And, in the end, the pilgrim, now apparently a lonely figure, keeps walking. The grass is “singing” and a wet blast is coming that brings rain “, symbol of rejuvenation, of resurrection. Three thunders are heard, and the voice of thunder, in Sanskrit, offers three words of advice:” Give, sympathize and Control “-” Shantih, Shantih, Shantih “, the peace that passes all understanding. Eliot sees the solution to the human situation in Hindu religious terms.
Eliot imposes the problem of the wasteland on us because we, whether we know it or not, are the citizens of the “unreal city” and we must find our Grail: the tray that Jesus used at the Last Supper and on which one of his is said to be the followers received His blood at the Crucifixion.