Death by Water

Gnothi sauton - Know thyself

The short fourth part of the poem is a deceptively simple interlude before the grand finale of What the Thunder Said.

Phlebas the Phoenician is the drowned sailor who appears in Madame Sosotris' cards; he may also be the one-eyed merchant. He is also associated, by a pun on currents/ currants, with Mr Eugenides, the eastern businessman. He has become one with the sea (Those are pearls that were his eyes); and he is a memento mori, the rattle of bones that warns us to live before it is too late.

He is reincarnated throughout time, future and past: the whirlpool he enters and the wheel we turn are symbols of the Karmic Wheel, the cycle of samsara, of birth, death and rebirth. He is a reminder that the sea is also a waste land (oed und leer das Meer).

• See above. A drowned sailor is carried by the sea into an eternity death and rebirth. 

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