“Shantih shantih shantih”
— T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)
Context
The Waste Land closes its 433-line modernist mosaic with this Sanskrit benediction — the formal ending of an Upanishad, in which 'Shantih' (śānti) means peace of body, mind, and surroundings. Eliot's own end-note glosses it as 'The Peace which passeth understanding,' equating it with Philippians 4:7. After polyglot fragments quoting Dante, Kyd, the Pervigilium Veneris, and the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, the poem ends not in English at all but in liturgical Sanskrit.
How the repetition works
Like the seraphim's 'Holy, holy, holy' in this catalogue, the triple 'Shantih' is a ritual formula in which adjacent threefold repetition is the prescribed liturgical form — not emotional emphasis but the canonical close of an Upanishad. What makes Eliot's example pedagogically distinct is the *transplant*: he imports a non-Western liturgical close as the final words of the defining poem of Western modernism. Epizeuxis here functions as a ceremonial gesture borrowed across traditions, signalling that the rite — such as it is — has been performed and there is nothing left to say.