Water as a Complex Symbol in "The Waste Land"

"Death by Water," Section IV of "The Waste Land," is by far the shortest individual section of the poem, but it seems integral to the poem as a whole. Many of the poem's themes are concentrated in these ten lines:

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep seas swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

Eliot develops a productive tension between forgetting and remembering. The dead sailor forgets the surface world, but the speaker urges the listener to remember the sailor. It seems that life may be forgotten when one enters the realm of death, but the reverse is not true: the living are to remember the dead. The dead inhabit the living.

The persistence of death in life is a theme touched upon throughout the poem, right from the beginning in which April's cruelty is evidenced by its "breeding / lilacs out of the dead land" (1-2). In "Death by Water," we see a foreshadowing of our death, since the sailor, "who was once handsome and tall as you," was not so virile as to avoid death. Since death seems to be at both ends of life, and life (in "The Waste Land") is comprised of remembering death, we seem always to emerging out of and into death.

An interesting contrast to the pervasiveness of death, however, is the collection of attempted sexual encounters through the poem. In some ways, sex (and reproduction more specifically) is a stay against death. We perpetuate ourselves and our species by producing the next generation. Eliot, who was moved by anthropological accounts of vegetation ceremonies, seems to call upon these notions in his choice of myths and symbols. Moreover, he was familiar with Remy de Gourmont's thought, which included radical ideas on the significance of sex in human behavior.

A productive intersection of Gourmont's and Eliot's perspectives occurs in the theme of unity. Gourmont points out in The Natural Philosophy of Love, "fecundation is the reintegration of differentiated elements into a unique element, a perpetual return to unity" (13). Eliot, as I've mentioned in other posts, is intensely interested in unity, as well. "Death by Water" presents the ultimate failure of sexuality. There is no redeeming aspect to this section; it represents a negative object lesson. There is no positive transformation (however cruel) in this section. Instead, the "current under sea / Picked his bones in whispers" (315-316).

As Brooker and Bentley point out in Reading The Waste Land, "Death by Water," despite its bleak sense of closure, is NOT the end of the poem. Instead, it comes just before the final section, "What the Thunder Said." In this way, Eliot situates the ending against the backdrop of unproductive death; it provides a contrast for what follows. The offerings of "What the Thunder Said" are unified with the drowned sailor and cannot be the offerings they are without him. The urgency of the rock and water section is intensified because it occurs after "Death by Water." Furthermore, the experience of water as both deadly and life-giving in such close proximity achieves a richer and more affecting reaction.