Author: Casey Morris

From the sterility of modern life, which I wrote about previously, Eliot looks ahead. The shadows fade. The Rhinemaidens end their song. We enter parts IV and V of The Waste Land, of which the former is the shortest. Ezra Pound cut so much from the original version, Eliot questioned including it at all. But on Pound’s insistence, the following lines were published as Part IV, “Death By Water”:

IV. Death by Water

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.

The lines announce a shift from parts I – III, particularly as an addendum to “The Fire Sermon.” They allude to “Dans le Restuarant,” a 1918 French poem written by Eliot. In this, the poet relates a conversation between a man and his waiter. In shockingly illicit language (i.e. “demotic french”), the waiter details his trysts with a young girl. Images of spring rain recall the sweat and scents of frolicking. Naturally, the patron is disgusted and dismisses him as a “lecher.” “Dans le Restaurant,” like Part IV, also mourns a drowned Phoenician sailor, Phlebas. In both poems, death by water punctuates scenes of sexual depravity. Yet drowning here (i.e. in the “The Waste Land”) is not the same as Madame Sosotris’s tarot card or Ophelia’s suicide. Phlebas’s death is not forsaken, not the result of perversion or social upheaval. Eliot’s lines, like a “current under sea” that “picked his bones in whispers,” traverse the breadth of the sailor’s life: his heroic past, his “stages of… age and youth,” and even the whims of Fortune’s Wheel unravel his passing. This unraveling is the return of humanity, of the soul and its dignity. As a cleansing force, death by water smothers less than it redeems. The purification sought, but not attained, in the fragmented Buddhist sermon doesn’t just displace fire with water. It signals something profound: the path out of the modern dilemma is not divine intervention or violence. It’s not money or hedonism. It is, actually, us. It is latent and deeply ingrained in the psyche. The immanence, felt but not always understood by “Gentile or Jew,” pulls the spirit from its slumber, out of the abyss and into the candlelight. 

What is this new path? Part V, “What The Thunder Said,” offers many clues. Like earlier sections, Part V is widely misunderstood by readers of The Waste Land. Its difficulty suggests the magnitude of its ideas, especially the soul-searching and work needed to achieve them. Eliot opens with a reference to the twelve apostles hiding after the Romans’ crucifixion of Jesus: 

 V. What the Thunder Said

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

Spiritual distress and anxiety (i.e. “torchlight red on sweaty faces”) tormented Christ’s disciples after his death. The “frosty silence” of the garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus wept in his final hours, evolves: dry and rocky plains with no vegetation. Rainless storms and roads without end. The speaker’s desperation for water mounts as the lines shrivel with enjambment: “If there were water/ And no rock/ If there were rock/ And also water/ And water/ A spring/ A pool among the rock/ If there were the sound of water only.” A sudden break, then derision. The following line was inspired by Eliot’s reading of Ernest Shackleton’s expeditions in Antarctica, during which the explorers had the delusion that someone else was present: “Who is the third who walks always beside you?” It also references the Gospels; in Luke chapter 24, two disciples stumble upon a third man (i.e. the resurrected Christ) on the road to Emmaus. More than desolate souls and deserts, the fabric of reality tears apart. Dissociation bursts into the streets: “the city over the mountains / Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air.” Vienna, London, Athens, and Jerusalem self-destruct as Sodom and Gomorrah. A grotesque image of a woman playing music to “bats with baby faces” seems a distortion of the Tower of Babel. Instead of thwarting ambition to reach the heavens, voices sing “out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.” Disembodied voices mark the living and dead. Without a distinction between heaven and earth, life and death, one thinks of Ivan Karamazov’s darkest conclusion: “all is permissible.” Temptation is inevitable. Eliot implies this in an allusion to Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. In the Chapel Perilous, Sir Lancelot was tempted. The poet’s chapel is just as spineless. It’s a shell of once-sacred truth. Are we strong enough to resist? Are we capable of redemption? Finally, Eliot offers some answers.

We discover a way forward, but it’s not obvious. Like anything else in The Waste Land, peace and restoration are buried amid the rubble. We read of the Ganges river, where “. . . the limp leaves / waited for rain.” In the dark sky, thunder claps. Rain gathers and starts to fall. The jungle speaks three mysterious words: Datta, Dayadhvam, and Damyata. These commands are taken from the Upanishands, a sacred text for both Hinduism and Buddhism. Translated from the Sanskrit, they are, respectively, “give,” “be compassionate,” and “control.” Eliot treats each command in several lines, implying renewal and spiritual rekindling. Though offering evidence for how to stem the modern tide, such noble ideas are never far from temptation: “The awful daring of a moment’s surrender / which an age of prudence can never retract / by this, and this only, we have existed.” A ravenous generation that looks neither before nor ahead corrupts received wisdom. The final stanza evokes this clash of past and present, of truth and decay. Eliot’s style returns in spiralling force with allusions to English nursery rhymes, Dante, Tennyson, and the Elizabethan dramatist Thomas Kyd: “Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.” In The Spanish Tragedy, Hieronimo speaks this line to his son’s murderers to both oblige them and plot his revenge. Perhaps it’s a taste of madness, another shard in the “heap of the broken images.” The reference implies the painful yet inevitable choice facing modernity. To stop the chaos, wars, suffering, and spiritual fracturing, sacrifices are necessary. Fire, death by water, and an imperfect (even belligerent) course to right the ship are all necessary. What remains is resolve. Without resolve, without consciousness informed by tradition and necessity, things fall apart. Being and knowledge lose their vitality. Poetry samples and riffs. Mere anarchy is the least of one’s concerns. 

For a poem over one-hundred years old, The Waste Land still resonates. Economic and geopolitical uncertainty, class tensions, greed, violence, intrusions of high and low culture, and an ever-evolving relation to truth describes the world in 1922. It suits ours, too. One achievement of Eliot’s poem, and of modernism generally, is a confrontation with our cardinal sins: lust, avarice, and pride. It’s the last that matters most. Though we comfort ourselves in thinking that 1922 is far gone, alien to our technocratic era and ultraconnectedness, we’re naive in that assumption. Duty to the past is not conformity. It’s not a submission to bad or primitive ideas, either. Assuming little to no value in what comes before is a dangerous business, especially in art. Some, like Harold Bloom, made a career in defending the “Canon” at all costs (i.e. the “anxiety of influence”). I wouldn’t go that far. But I’d go as far as Eliot: when drinking the same water, don’t poison the well. Innovation, “art pour l’art,” isn’t always the answer. Art, especially the literary, exerts a lasting and formative influence on the will. We all preserve a mythos, a disastrously embarrassing spark for what lies ahead. Is that right? Is it wrong? It’s neither, and that’s exactly the point. Meaningful self-understanding, and its artistic expressions, are inseparable from the past, from the inheritance we all share. The aesthetic is bound up in the real, and it offers a powerful path towards healing and restoration. As the Fisher King tends to his broken lands, and as the closing words in Sanskrit profess, peace is an assertion. It’s a resolve for unity that justifies experience with the eternity of death. Peace that is the rising of one day and all. Peace that floods, abides. The peace that passeth understanding.

Sources: 

Eliot, T.S. “Dans le Restaurant.” All Poetry. URL: https://allpoetry.com/Dans-le-Restaurant

Eliot, T.S. “The Waste Land.” Poetry Foundation. 2025. URL: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land

Kozak, Aspen, et. al. “The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot.” URL: https://thewastelandgajj.weebly.com/v-what-the-thunder-said.html

Libes, Liza. “T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land – Part 4.” Pens and Poison. 2024. URL: https://www.pensandpoison.org/p/ts-eliots-the-waste-land-part-4

Tearle, Oliver Dr. “A Short Analysis of T.S. Eliot’s ‘What The Thunder Said.’” Interesting Literature. 2025. URL: https://interestingliterature.com/2016/11/a-short-analysis-of-t-s-eliots-what-the-thunder-said/

“The Philosophy of Dostoevsky Chapter 4: If God Does Not Exist, Everything is Permitted.” Fellowship & Fairydust. 2023. URL: https://fellowshipandfairydust.com/2023/11/07/the-philosophy-of-dostoevsky-chapter-4-if-god-does-not-exist-everything-is-permitted/

“Tower of Babel.” Britannica. URL: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Tower-of-Babel

“What Happened To The 12 Disciples?” Faith On Hill Church. 2020. URL: https://www.faithonhill.com/blog/what-happened-to-the-12-disciples