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How does the ending of The Waste Land suggest redemption?
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T.S. Eliot
T.S. Eliot working on his play The Cocktail Party in his office at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, 1948. The letters of the alphabet in his diagram represent characters in the play. The Greek letters represent characters yet to be invented.
The ending of T.S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land suggests redemption through the use of a Sanskrit refrain: "Shantih shantih shantih."1
Eliot translated this phrase in his own footnotes as "The peace which passeth understanding." While the refrain originates from Hindu scripture, Eliot’s translation serves as a deliberate allusion to a passage in the Christian New Testament, specifically Philippians 4:7. By concluding the poem with this spiritual invocation, Eliot offers a note of hope and a promise of salvation that contrasts with the preceding imagery of a sterile, fragmented, and disillusioned world.12