Death by Water Explication

“Death by Water” is about the wasted lives in modern society.  

Phlebas the Phoenician is a reference to the tarot cards from “The Burial of the Dead”. The Phoenician Sailor died by drowning, and as we know, water is a symbol for spirituality. The water a killing the man in this section is a symbol for how our lack of spirituality, and additionally our lack of culture entirely, will be the downfall of our modern society. T.S. Elliot is making a statement about the unimportance of what we tend to value in our lives now, like money or items with monetary worth, because in death those things hold no value, unlike spirituality.

“As he rose and fell, He passed the stages of his age and youth, entering the whirlpool.” In these lines, the speaker is talking about the human condition of wanting to alter the unchangeable, one example of this is being on your deathbed and having to rethink your life and the decisions you made. T.S. Elliot reinforces the idea of wastefulness and unfulfillment with the image of a whirlpool. In a whirlpool, everything enters once, is sucked down faster than one would think possible, and then poof, the human eye looses sight of it. Well, when you think about it, life works in a fairly similar way. This image shows how quickly time passes and how little you can achieve in the amount allotted, like in the case of the drowned Phoenician. The whirlpool could also represent the draining of modern culture happening throughout time, and in the history of the world, modern society passes in the swirl of a whirlpool.

The last few lines of this section are a call out to “Gentile or Jew” (people of all religions) to take Phlebas as a warning. Basically, he’s telling us that mortality is looming, and inescapable, and that it wouldn’t be a bad thing to be more aware of the fact that we are all going to die someday, so make the most of the time we have. He furthers this idea with the mention of a wheel, which has two meaning: first, the wheel of the ship used by the Phoenician, and second, the wheel of chance that was spoken of in “The Burial of the Dead”. While the wheel on a boat is something we use for control, the wheel on the tarot card meant random chance, like the death of a sailor at sea. The physical wheel is representing us controlling our destiny, and the metaphysical tarot wheel is representing the fragility of our mortality.