“Consider Phlebas, who was once as handsome and tall as you.”Įliot’s warning reverberates in the air here, it is perfectly clear, and unlike Eliot’s usual style, it is not a riddle it seems clear that Phlebas is the example an example of a lack of spirituality, and what becomes of those who waste themselves. They are being degraded and being eroded.

The final line of this part is perhaps the most important however, almost serving as a warning for how people are living how they are neglecting their spiritual lives, and how they are no longer as human as they once were. This passage really compounds the feeling of change that has been, slowly, creeping into the poem the change of descriptions occurs very slowly, creating something comparable to a phoenix rising from the ashes. The idea of a spiritual death adds a feeling of gracefulness to the passage, instead of the previously decadent and yet acerbic tone that precedes this section. “Forgot the profit and loss” is very striking, and contains a kind of ethereal quality this feeling of floating continues in the second stanza of this section “he rose and fell”, for example. Hamlet’s Ophelia drowns herself, her final words having already been mentioned at the end of Part II.Įliot makes reference in this passage to the idea of wealth, and material happiness, the very idea of which he attacked in Part III. There are numerous references to meaningful, spiritual deaths throughout literature again here, we can consider Shakespeare. Phlebas’s death therefore is representative of a deeply spiritual death something that is lacking throughout the poem.

T.S Eliot uses water as a subliminal metaphor throughout the poem, representing fertility and the ability to resurrect the dry nature of the waste land as described represents the importance of water. The most meaningful element of Phlebas’s character however is the way in which he died he dies as a result of drowning. As a mythological character, he seems to have influenced authors across the ages, including Shakespeare in his writing of The Tempest Phlebas as a character is comparable to Alonso. As is so common in Eliot’s poetry, there is a huge amount of allusion, primarily to Phlebas, the Phoenician Sailor. It is composed of only ten lines, divided into three stanzas. To my mind at least, Part IV of the poem, “Death by Water”, is the most beautiful.