Phlebes the Phoenician, starts to drown and starts to pass his age and youth. The poem hints that he could possibly be dead – “once handsome and as tall as you” but it doesn’t confirm it. It’s weird that earlier the people were so distraught over not having any water and the land being ‘waste’, but now we’re concerned over having too much, too much life, too much hope for life. There’s a connection between the death and life. Death, being the waste land above and life or living dead is more underwater. Without water, you are hopeless – you can’t create without it, you are stuck at a standstill of misery (kind of like Sybil, old but never dying). The irony in this section goes back to the very first line of the entire poem – SPRING. Spring, like water is a creation of life, but in this poem spring season is considered bad and water is deadly.
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Part 4: Summary: Death by Water
The fourth section of the Waste Land is the Death by Water. The major theme throughout this section is the importance of water. This section, having the turn, moves from having a lack of water (Waste Land), to having possibly too much and having it be ‘death by water’. Quite frankly, I’d rather have too much water than none at all. Water provides life, without water, you have nothing.
Phlebes the Phoenician, starts to drown and starts to pass his age and youth. The poem hints that he could possibly be dead – “once handsome and as tall as you” but it doesn’t confirm it. It’s weird that earlier the people were so distraught over not having any water and the land being ‘waste’, but now we’re concerned over having too much, too much life, too much hope for life. There’s a connection between the death and life. Death, being the waste land above and life or living dead is more underwater. Without water, you are hopeless – you can’t create without it, you are stuck at a standstill of misery (kind of like Sybil, old but never dying). The irony in this section goes back to the very first line of the entire poem – SPRING. Spring, like water is a creation of life, but in this poem spring season is considered bad and water is deadly.
Phlebes the Phoenician, starts to drown and starts to pass his age and youth. The poem hints that he could possibly be dead – “once handsome and as tall as you” but it doesn’t confirm it. It’s weird that earlier the people were so distraught over not having any water and the land being ‘waste’, but now we’re concerned over having too much, too much life, too much hope for life. There’s a connection between the death and life. Death, being the waste land above and life or living dead is more underwater. Without water, you are hopeless – you can’t create without it, you are stuck at a standstill of misery (kind of like Sybil, old but never dying). The irony in this section goes back to the very first line of the entire poem – SPRING. Spring, like water is a creation of life, but in this poem spring season is considered bad and water is deadly.
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Is this a negative section? Phlebes is dead here, but is there hope for resurrection in this section? Yes, this section moves far away from land.
ReplyDeleteLook at the line breaks and the stanzas. Also note that there are no allusions in this part.