T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land - Part 4
A Pens and Poison Poetry Analysis
Welcome back to the Pens and Poison The Waste Land analysis series! Today, we’ll be looking at “Death by Water,” the fourth part of this monumental 20th century poem about the futility of human intimacy.
You may access the full poem here.
Check out my previous The Waste Land analysis posts:
“Death by Water” is the shortest section of The Waste Land. According to Ezra Pound, the poet who helped bring The Waste Land to the state we know it in today, “Death by Water” is an “integral” part of the poem that helps bridge the desolation we see in the first three sections and the redemption that we will attain in the fifth and final section. “Death by Water” might be the poem’s shortest section, but its inspiration is drawn from a longer piece of Eliot’s: the section is a close translation of the final stanza of Eliot’s 1918 French poem “Dans le Restaurant,” a poem that takes us through the sort of city scenes that we find in the first three sections of The Waste Land. In this particular poem, Eliot describes an encounter between a man at a restaurant and his waiter. Because “Dans le Restaurant” has never adequately been translated into English, little scholarship exists on it, and the scholars who have written on it seem to be either stumped by the Phlebas stanza at the end or convinced that Eliot meant the stanza to be an entirely separate poem. When taken in the context of The Waste Land, however, the meaning of Eliot’s “Dans le Restaurant” becomes clear, and we can use this poem to inform our reading of “Death by Water” in The Waste Land.
“Dans le Restaurant” opens with a scene of a waiter talking to a restaurant patron. Immediately, the waiter begins telling the story of his youth and sharing memories of his homeland. He then segues into a memory of a sexual encounter he had at the age of seven with a little girl (whom he describes as “toute mouillée,” a phrase that would have carried a sexual meaning even in Eliot’s time) before giving her primroses. He then mentions 38 stains on her waistcoat and says he caressed her and fell into delirium. The restaurant patron dubs the waiter a lecher before the waiter concludes his story by saying that he let the girl go halfway through the act, which he says is “a shame.”
“Dans le Restaurant” is an oddly sexual poem for Eliot. It was written several years before The Waste Land and nearly ten years before his conversion to Anglicanism. The restaurant scene, however, which culminates in the famous Phlebas stanza, is yet another instance of unnatural or stilted love—the sort we’ve seen throughout the first three sections of The Waste Land. Rather than interpreting the final stanza of “Dans le Restaurant” as a standalone poem, we can thus read it as a logical necessity at the end of such a fraught scene—a ritualistic cleansing of sorts through water.
In the remainder of The Waste Land, water will be a proxy for rebirth. “Death by Water” is a culmination of sorts that invites readers to reflect on their mortality, especially by referencing the act of drowning. In this section, Phlebas the Phonecian sailor loses his life to water (hence, “Death by Water”). We have seen several instances of drowning in the poem so far—most notably in the Madame Sosostris passage in “The Burial of the Dead”—and in the first three sections of the poem, drowning is presented as a negative. Madame Sosostris, for instance, describes a tarot card with a “drowned Phonecian Sailor” (whom we can now assume is Phlebas) and announces “Fear death by water.” The Madame Sosostris section also alludes to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which contains another unfortunate instance of drowning. Early on in the poem, therefore, drowning carries a negative connotation and is associated with the fear that dominates the early stanzas (recall “fear in a handful of dust”). By the time we reach “Death by Water,” on the other hand, the act of drowning takes on a more positive connotation—drowning seems to be intricately linked with rebirth through the acceptance of suffering.
At first glance, Phlebas’ death is nothing special: by placing Phlebas in the distant Phoenician past, Eliot seems to be suggesting that Phlebas might have little relevance to our present world. He is at once forgotten and forgets, a poignant reminder that there is no memory in death, either for the deceased or for those who forget him. Eliot then suggests that all people must go through death—that no matter what stature one reaches in life, all living beings reach the same grim conclusion. It is a short section with somewhat macabre diction that at first suggests nothing of hope or regeneration, but when we consider it against the sort of sexually impure moments that pervade both the world of The Waste Land and “Dans le Restaurant,” it becomes evident that this “death by water” indicates a ritualistic cleansing. It is no accident that Eliot places “Death by Water” at the tail end of the Buddhist ritual of cleansing through fire. This death might be ordinary—it might suggest nothing regenerative—but it is an invitation for us to consider our mortality. Eliot seems to be suggesting that the moment we come to terms with our mortality, we might find rebirth and regeneration in life—we might be cleansed of worldly sins and sexual impurities and find a deeper meaning in our rote existence. And indeed, as we progress to the final section of the poem, we will see that hypothesis realized as water becomes a powerful symbol of cleansing and regeneration.
Stay tuned for the final installment of my analysis of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, where we’ll trace the poem to its more optimistic conclusion in its fifth section—“What the Thunder Said.”
Thank you for the commentary! I just did another reading of the Waste Land last week and you just answered more than a few question I have been having for several years.