T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (TWL), lines 312-321
IV. Death by Water
This is the water section, the fourth of five sections of The Waste Land that
adopt the themes of the CLASSICAL ELEMENTS of earth, air, fire, water and
wind. Eliot would later repeat this structure with the first four elements and the
quintessential wind in Four Quartets (1943). Designation of these classical
elements can be found in early Babylonian, Indian, Greek and Chinese
philosophies.
See Anon., Enuma Elis (ca. 1800 BC, tr. as The Seven Tablets of Creation
by E. A. Wallis Budge, 1921), a Babylonian cuneiform text which describes
creation through personifications of water, earth, sky and fire.
See also Upanishads, Shvetashvatara Upanishad 2:12 (ca 400-200 BC, tr.
Robert Ernest Hume, 1921):
When the fivefold quality of Yoga has been produced,
Arising from earth, water, fire, air and space,
No sickness, no old age, no death has he
Who has obtained a body made out of the fire of Yoga.
See also Plato, Timaeus 48b, (ca. 360 BC, tr. W.R.M. Lamb, 1925):
We must gain a view of the real nature of fire and water, air and earth,
as it was before the birth of Heaven.
Finally, see Anon., Mawangdui Silk Texts (ca. 168 BC), presenting the Chinese
philosophy of Wu Xing and the five phases of wood, fire, earth, metal and water.
Eliot foreshadowed the title and theme of this section pages earlier when Madame
Sosostris generally warned her patron to “Fear death by water” (TWL 55). Like
the previous sections, this section is full of allusions, but the primary source of the
text is now Eliot’s own voice, loosely translated from a poem he first wrote in
French. See Eliot, Dans le Restaurant (1920), stanza 3; here is my translation
of In the Restaurant, prompted by Eliot’s restatement and adding my own take of
the “Dans” variations:
Phlebas the Phoenician, fifteen days dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls and the swell of Cornwall
And the profits and losses and the cargo of tin:
A current under sea took him far away,
Past the stages of his former life.
You have to consider, it was a painful exit;
All the same, he was a man who once was
handsome and tall.
Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
PHLEBAS THE PHOENICIAN reflects the drowned Phoenician Sailor, whose
death by water Madame Sosostris portended (see above) and whose eyes are
now pearls (see below).
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
By his association with profit and loss and by Eliot’s own explanations (see his
note at TWL 218), Phlebas is related to Mr. Eugenides, the one eyed Smyrna
merchant (TWL 52, 208);
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Shakespeare, The Tempest 1.2.376-402); and to the hyacinth girl (see Eliot's
note at TWL 126).
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
The speaker now turns ambivalently to the Gentile or Jew i.e., one without
distinction whether one is in the faith or out of it; compare TWL 365 (“I do not know
whether a man or a woman”). See also Romans 3: 9-10:
What then? are we better than they? No, in no wise: for we have before
proved both Jews and Gentiles, that they are all under sin; As it is written,
There is none righteous, no, not one.
O you who turn the wheel and look windward,
Speaking directly to “YOU” THE READER, the poet appears to once again break
the fourth wall. He could just as easily be talking to himself, and an earlier instance
also suggests that he is addressing his editor as “hypocrite lecteur” (see TWL 69,
76), but this passage and several others (see especially TWL 21, 76, 320 and 360
but also TWL 17, 113, 122, 126 and 432) seem to be directed more to the “you,”
whether poet or fellow pilgrim, who would seek answers through the figurative
reading of the cards and the various surrounding elements of earth, water, etc.
also reflects the whirlpool now being entered by “you” who look windward; thus, in
this sense “you” are the reader who would turn with the poet towards the wind. The
wind, or spirit, is the fifth classical element about to be introduced in Section 5.
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
superior to intellect, in contrast to Socrates, who valued knowledge. See
Plato, Philebus (360 BC), tr. Harold N. Fowler (1925), 48e:
SOCRATES
And there are still more who think they are taller and handsomer than they are...
The Socratic evaluation begins with DECONSTRUCTION, and here the reader is
told to separately consider what the water has done. Compare this to how each of
the classical elements is deconstructed in turn, beginning at the end of Section 1,
just before the “lecteur” passage, when the reader is asked to consider what
happens to a body planted in the earth (TWL 71-72); then near the end of Section
2, when the poet asks what “we” can ever do in the empty air (TWL 131-138); and
finally in the consumption of fire at the end of Section 3 (TWL 308- 311) with the
suggested allusion to the Sermon on the Mount, addressed very much to “you.”
See Matthew 6:23:
If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!
Time indeed to turn toward the wind.
from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, with annotations (and other explanations)
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