ABSTRACT
In contrast to some of the other oracular passages in The Waste Land, 'Death by Water' sounds authoritative. Eliot's excised lines combine the two emotions of nostalgia and pride. Eliot deeply re-thought and re-felt 'Dans le Restaurant' in translating it for its new context. In 'Death by Water' they become general and elegiac — though they are still related, be it indirectly, to trade through association with Phoenicia, a seafaring and trading nation, and more indirectly still through references to trade elsewhere in The Waste Land. In 'Death by Water' the profit and loss imply a universal moral balance sheet weighing all that we are and could be. In the 'Death by Water' sequence of The Waste Land, the emphasis is unmistakably on the gentleness of Phlebas' death. 'Un sort penible', a painful fate, does not appear in 'Death by Water'.
