Death by Water

This section of the poem doesn’t really fit in. Previously throughout the poem Elliot has gone through great lengths to show the idea that there is lack of water and here there is actually so much water that it kills someone. Water here is actually a life giving force, this means that it was actually to much life force that killed the person. This plays into the idea that the people in this poem are the walking dead and that they are living, but lifeless, so when the dead person was touched with too much life he died. The dead man who is lying dead in the sea is Phlebas the Phoenician. I believe this refers back to the drowned Phoenician in the first section of the poem The Burial of the Dead.