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Section 0 of The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot
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IV. Death by Water
Lines 312–321Phlebas
The brief elegy for Phlebas the Phoenician, who forgot profit and loss in death
About this passage
The shortest section turns from fire to drowning, giving Phlebas a stripped ritual of forgetting, current, and bone. 'Consider Phlebas' makes the lyric an address to the reader, not just an episode about a dead Phoenician sailor. Watch how profit, beauty, nationality, and height vanish under water's democratic reduction.
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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.
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