Summary
The shortest section of the poem, “Death by Water” describes
a man, Phlebas the Phoenician, who has died, apparently by drowning.
In death he has forgotten his worldly cares as the creatures of
the sea have picked his body apart. The narrator asks his reader
to consider Phlebas and recall his or her own mortality.
Form
While this section appears on the page as a ten-line stanza,
in reading, it compresses into eight: four pairs of rhyming couplets.
Both visually and audibly, this is one of the most formally organized
sections of the poem. It is meant to recall other highly organized
forms that often have philosophical or religious import, like aphorisms
and parables. The alliteration and the deliberately archaic language
(“o you,” “a fortnight dead”) also contribute to the serious, didactic
feel of this section.
Commentary
The major point of this short section is to rebut ideas
of renewal and regeneration. Phlebas just dies; that’s it. Like
Stetson’s corpse in the first section, Phlebas’s body yields nothing
more than products of decay. However, the section’s meaning is far
from flat; indeed, its ironic layering is twofold. First, this section
fulfills one of the prophecies of Madame Sosostris in the poem’s
first section: “Fear death by water,” she says, after pulling the card
of the Drowned Sailor. Second, this section, in its language and
form, mimics other literary forms (parables, biblical stories, etc.)
that are normally rich in meaning. These two features suggest that
something of great significance lies here. In reality, though, the
only lesson that Phlebas offers is that the physical reality of death
and decay triumphs over all. Phlebas is not resurrected or transfigured.
Eliot further emphasizes Phlebas’s dried-up antiquity and irrelevance
by placing this section in the distant past (by making Phlebas a
Phoenician).
