Hello everyone, today I come with a different thing in my blog. We all read poems, and easily get the idea of the poem but here i want to give an excuse that T. S. Eliot wrote a poem, very difficult and hard to understand. So my today's topic is the poem "The Waste Land" by Eliot. This task is given by our professor dr. Dilip Barad sir. So let's understand the poem.
We know that poets are also influenced by some events that took place in the past and poets include this type of event and the myth about that in their poem. So in this poem The Waste Land we also see that T. S. Eliot is a poet who gave many references and myths of different countries and their religion in his poem. In this poem we see the Indian myths. One among the many western scholars, who were influenced by Indian philosophy, T.S. Eliot let his understanding become a key factor in his magnum opus, The Waste Land. The dominant poetic voice of the 1920s, Eliot used an essential, allusive and elliptical technique to put across the view that modern western urban civilisation was sterile and unsatisfying. He avoided personal emotion in contrast to the more romantic effusions of the Georgian poets. His distaste for romanticism, a desire to treat the poem in isolation from the poet and the cult of traditional classical values went hand in hand with a dislike of the modern world.
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns Eliot (26 September 1888 – 4 January 1965) was a poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic and editor. Considered one of the 20th century's major poets, he is a central figure in English-language Modernist poetry. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a prominent Boston Brahmin family, he moved to England in 1914 at the age of 25 and went on to settle, work, and marry there. He became a British citizen in 1927 at the age of 39, subsequently renouncing his American citizenship. Eliot first attracted widespread attention for his poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in 1915, which was received as a modernist masterpiece. It was followed by some of the best-known poems in the English language, including
"The Waste Land" (1922),
"The Hollow Men" (1925),
"Ash Wednesday" (1930), and
Four Quartets (1943).
The Waste Land appeared in 1922. The poem, which won Eliot the Nobel Prize in 1948, follows the legend of the Holy Grail and the Fisher King combined with vignettes of contemporary British society. He employs literary and cultural allusions from the western canon, Buddhism and the Hindu Upanishads. The poem shifts between voices of satire and prophecy featuring abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location, time and conjuring a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literatures. Let's see one video about the poem...
The Waste Land is divided into five sections.
The “Burial of the Dead” introduces the diverse themes of disillusionment and despair.
The second is “A Game of Chess” and
The third, “The Fire Sermon,” shows the influence of Augustine and Eastern religions.
The fourth is “Death by Water” and the fifth and
Final section is “What the Thunder Said,” which features the influence of Indian thought on the Poet Laureate.
Eliot became a prominent poet in the aftermath of the chaos and convulsions of the First World War. Europe was home to existential philosophy owing its origin to Kierkegaard. This was a reaction against German idealism and the complacency of established Christianity.
In his popular modernist poem "The Waste Land," Eliot makes various references to Greek mythology, Shakespeare, and many others, and even incorporates some Phoenician and Indian elements. He masterfully reconstructs all of them.
T.S Eliot was highly influenced by Indian philosophy. He makes an incontrovertible appeal to the thunder of the ‘Brihdarankya Upanishad’ in the final portion of The Waste Land. The scene shifts to the Ganges, half a world away from Europe, where thunder rumbles. Eliot draws on the traditional interpretation of “what the thunder says,” as taken from the Upanishads. According to these fables, the thunder “gives,” “sympathizes,” and “controls” through its “speech”; Eliot launches into a meditation on each of these aspects of the thunder’s power. The meditations seem to bring about some sort of reconciliation, as a Fisher King-type figure is shown sitting on the shore preparing to put his lands in order, a sign of his imminent death or at least abdication. The poem ends with a series of disparate fragments from a children’s song, from Dante, and from Elizabethan drama, leading up to a final chant of “Shantih shantih shantih” the traditional ending to an Upanishad. Eliot, in his notes to the poem, translates this chant as “the peace which passeth understanding,” the expression of ultimate resignation.
Dr. Radhakrishnan records how T.S. Eliot, when asked about the future of our Civilization said,
“Internecine fighting, people killing one another in the streets.”
Civilization to him appeared a crumbling edifice destined to perish in the flames of war. The tragedy of the human condition imposes an obligation on us to give meaning and significance to life. Eliot’s prescription for a new dawn is given in Part V ,
“What the Thunder Said.”
“Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves
Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.
The jungle crouched, humped in silence.
Then spoke the thunder
There are numerous examples of Hindu influences on the "Wasteland." Some of these allusions are obvious, such as the Hindu story footnoted in Part V. or the repetition of "shantih" at the poem's close. Others are only apparent if you know where to look. Illustrations of life-in-death are reminders of the Hindu concept of maya, or the ultimate unreality of what we consider life. Maya describes the veil of illusion that leads people to believe that the world is made up of things separate and distinct, and blinds them to the reality that life is in fact a unified whole. Hindu philosophy teaches that it is the ignorance of this unity which is at the root of all human misery and suffering. Illustrations of the other aspect of this motif, life-in-death, can also serve as reminders of Hindu philosophy, specifically the concept of reincarnation. According to this idea, reincarnation or rebirth is not something to be celebrated, but instead signifies that the person being reborn has not yet realized the unity of life. Those who fail to come to this realization are doomed to rebirth and the continuation of an endless cycle of suffering in a world of illusions.
Thus, Eliot finishes the poem writing:
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih
"Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata," refer to the concepts of "giving, compassion and control" of the ancient Indian religious and philosophical texts Upanishads, which are based on the ideas of Hinduism and Buddism. According to the texts, all people must follow these three concepts in order to achieve inner piece, and the Gods and nature can enable this. The word "Shantih" is actually the formal ending of the Upanishads, and literary means "inner peace."
There is story behind this. Three kinds of children of Praja-pati, Lord of Children, lived as Brahman-students with Praja-pati their father:
The gods,
Human beings,
The demons.
Living with him as Brahman students, the gods spake, 'Teach us, Exalted One. 'Unto them he spake this one syllable Da. 'Have ye understood?' 'We have understood', thus they spake, 'it was damyata, control yourselves, that thou saidest unto us.' 'Yes', spake he, 'ye have understood.'
Then spake to him human beings, 'Teach us, Exalted One.' Unto them he spake that selfsame syllable Da. 'Have ye understood?' 'We have understood', thus they spake, 'it was datta, give, that thou saidest unto us.' 'Yes', spake he, 'ye have
understood.'
Then spake to him the demons, 'Teach us, Exalted One.' Unto them he spake that selfsame syllable Da. 'Have ye understood?' 'We have understood', thus they spake, 'it was dayadhvam, be compassionate, that thou saidest unto us.' 'Yes', spake he, 'ye have understood.'
This it is which that voice of god repeats, the thunder, when it rolls 'Da Da Da,' that is damyata datta dayadhvam. Therefore these three must be learned, self-control, giving, compassion. Charles Rockwell Lanman, former Wales Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University and Eliot's teacher of Sanskrit and Buddhism.
If Eliot alludes that the 'Waste Land' is, in fact, the modern world which was reshaped by the First World War, then, with the use of the sacred chant "Shantih," Eliot ends the poem with a hopeful and spiritual tone, implying that peace and harmony can, in fact, be achieved. This is how he breaks the traditional form of writing poetry and leaves his typical modernistic stamp.
The Waste Land’ is modern poem by T.S Eliot which has deep essence of Hindu religion. Last part of the poem speaks about the Indian philosophy and religion. It reflects the search for the self and it’s relation with the universe. It is the journey of getting the ultimate goal of human being “Salvation”. The word ‘Shantih’ has deep meaning of the Hindu thoughts and philosophy. Last section of the poem is full of Hind mythology.
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