![]() ![]() Modernist poets often embraced free verse, but Eliot had a more guarded view, believing that all good poetry had the ‘ghost’ of a metre behind the lines. Not unlike the remains of a shipwreck, we might say. ‘Death by Water’ is only ten lines long, though in fact, given that the lines beginning ‘A current under sea’ and ‘Gentile or Jew’ complete the line above them, it is almost as if ‘Death by Water’ is an eight-line unit that has become fragmented and parts of it have begun to drift away from each other. As well as ‘profit and loss’ we get ‘rose and fell’, ‘age and youth’, ‘Gentile or Jew’, all pairs of opposites, or differences, which death renders immaterial. The abridged lyric we get in ‘Death by Water’ turns on pairings which are joined by ‘and’ or ‘or’, as if to suggest the bobbing of the waves: up and down, up and down. ![]() You can’t take it with you, as the saying has it. It is sensible to assume that Phlebas, belonging to the Phoenicians as he does, is a trader too: note in ‘Death by Water’ how one of the things he forgets in death is the ‘profit and loss’. One particularly intriguing one is the poem’s reference to Mylae and Carthage, which critic Eleanor Cook interpreted in terms of economist John Maynard Keynes’ criticism of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which ended WWI, as a ‘Carthaginian peace’. ![]()
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