IV.
Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea 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.
V.
After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience
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Death by Water is the shortest section of the poem, yet far from least significant. Its stark difference in length is courtesy of Ezra Pound, whom the poem is dedicated to — in fact, many consider Waste Land to be the brainchild of both Eliot and Pound due to Pound’s extensive edits of the text. Eliot briefly considered eliminating this section altogether but was convinced by Pound of its importance. Indeed, Phlebas the Phoenician is the final piece of the extended metaphor of death by water, first propositioned in Burial of the Dead by Madame Sosostris (“Fear death by water”) after pulling the card of the Drowned Sailor. The death of the hyacinth girl and allusions to Shakespeare’s Ophelia both serve a narrative purpose in the poem, however; that of Phlebas does not. He is simply dead, has been for a millennium, and the journey that lead us to him will grant him no freedom from the decay. We are hence asked by the narrator to consider Phlebas and in turn consider our own mortality.
The final section of Waste Land immediately erupts with dramatic imagery: there is no water, the thunder brings no rain (“dry sterile”), and the suffering crowds become “hooded hordes swarming.” We are transported to a scene in which two men are accompanied by the specter of a third figure. In the end notes, Eliot elaborates with Ernest Shackleton’s accounts of an Antarctic expedition in which Shackleton and other explorers “maintained the delusion” of an extra member present, though this is also a clear allusion to a story from the Gospel of Luke, in which two disciples encounter a visitant, revealed to be post-resurrection Jesus. The Unreal Cities that we have visited over the course of the poem — Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna, London — are destroyed, rebuilt, and destroyed once more. The apocalypse is upon us (A modern iteration of this first episode can be found in Phoebe Bridgers’ I Know The End: “Went looking for a creation myth / Ended up with a pair of cracked lips […] Slot machines, fear of God […] Big bolts of lighting hanging low […] No, I’m not afraid to disappear…”).
A seemingly random call from a farmyard bird brings a “damp gust,” and the poem telescopes to India at the Ganges. Eliot now awards the thunder a voice: “DA.” In a collection of Hindu scriptures called the Upanishads, “DA” is the voice of the thunder: it is the root of “Datta” (“Give”), “Dayadhvam” (“Sympathize”), and “Damyata” (“Control”), which is what “the thunder does” according to these fables. Hugh Kenner explains: “If the race’s most permanent wisdom is its oldest, then DA, the voice of the thunder and of the Hindu sages, is the cosmic voice not yet dissociated into echoes.”
The final stanza prepares the narrator for death (“Shall I set my lands in order?”), and we travel through more “cultural detritus”: a nursery rhyme, Dante’s Purgatorio, Gérard de Nerval’s El Desdichado, each appear in their languages of first printing, “these fragments I have shored against my ruins.” The poem comes to a close with an incantation — shanith shanith shanith, a repetition of the Sanskrit word for peace, is the traditional ending to an Upanishad. Eliot translates this phrase in the end notes as “the peace which passeth understanding,” and thus, he resigns. It is significant that the final words of the poem are distinctly non-Western. In his departure, Eliot invokes the idea of a set of paradigms unfamiliar to his audience, hence planting a seed of hope for an alternative ending to which the characters of Waste Land are fated to.