These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe. \ Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih
A 1922 poem by modernist poet T. S. Elliot; probably his most famous, maybe the most famous of the era1. It’s very disjointed, and it’s full of fragmented references2, which makes it a complex puzzle to unpack.
But it is at least a reflection of the Grail legend, with its doubts and struggle, and of the confusion without it or outside of it—living in a disenchanted world where the magic of the quest seems so far away.
Footnotes
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Which was the Lost Generation, which it often is used to represent. ↩
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Like a motet or like how there’s quotes in (many of) these pages, so you can see why I like it. ↩