Phlebas
Phlebas the Phoenician is a fictional character in T. S. Eliot's works, featured in the fourth section, "Death by Water," of his seminal modernist poem The Waste Land, originating from his earlier poem "Dans le Restaurant" (1918), as a drowned merchant sailor whose demise illustrates the transience of life and the dissolution of personal identity in death.[1] In the poem's 10-line vignette, Phlebas is described as having been dead for a fortnight, having forgotten "the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell / And the profit and loss," while an undersea current picks his bones in whispers, carrying him through the "stages" of his former existence as a worldly trader from ancient Phoenicia.[2] The section culminates in a direct address to the reader: "Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you," serving as a memento mori that underscores the universal inevitability of mortality amid the poem's broader themes of cultural decay, spiritual barrenness, and post-World War I disillusionment.[3] Published in 1922 as part of The Waste Land, Eliot's fragmented masterpiece influenced by the mythic method and drawing on diverse literary, mythological, and religious sources, Phlebas represents the drowned Phoenician sailor foretold earlier by the tarot-reading Madame Sosostris, linking to motifs of failed fertility and prophetic vision throughout the work.[4] The character's name evokes ancient Semitic maritime traders but is an Eliot invention, blending classical allusions—such as to the drowned sailor in Ariel's song from Shakespeare's The Tempest—with Eastern and Western fertility myths to emphasize death's equalizing force across time and cultures.[5] Critics interpret Phlebas as embodying baptismal rebirth through drowning or the futility of material pursuits, contrasting the poem's living wasteland dwellers with this submerged oblivion.[6] The evocative phrase "Consider Phlebas" from the poem's closing lines has permeated literature, most notably as the title of Iain M. Banks's 1987 science fiction novel Consider Phlebas, the debut in his Culture series depicting an interstellar war between the utopian, AI-driven Culture and the theocratic Idiran Empire.[7] In Banks's space opera, the title alludes to the poem's meditation on death and futility, framing the narrative's exploration of ideological conflict, identity, and the hubris of advanced civilizations through the anti-hero Bora Horza Gobuchul, a shape-shifting operative who opposes the Culture's machine-dominated society.[7] This adaptation highlights Phlebas's enduring symbolic resonance, transforming Eliot's intimate elegy into a lens for examining cosmic-scale existential themes in speculative fiction.As a Literary Character in T. S. Eliot's Works
In "Dans le Restaurant"
"Dans le Restaurant" is a 31-line poem written in French by T.S. Eliot during 1916–1917, depicting a conversation in a dingy eatery between a solitary patron and a loquacious, disheveled waiter.[8] The waiter, bored and intrusive, shares a crude anecdote from his youth involving sexual exploitation by an older woman, which the patron receives with detached reflections on urban decay and sensory discomfort. This bawdy exchange builds to a didactic close, where the waiter invokes the fate of Phlebas as a cautionary emblem of mortality and the perils of carnal indulgence.[9] Phlebas appears in the poem's final stanza as "Phlébas, le Phénicien," a merchant sailor who has drowned after fifteen days at sea, his body adrift and purged of worldly concerns. The original French excerpt states:Phlébas, le Phénicien, pendant quinze jours noyé,This passage portrays Phlebas's submersion as a liminal journey, where underwater currents carry him through reminiscences of his past, stripping away memories of seabirds' calls, Cornish waves, commercial gains and losses, and his tin-laden cargo. Ezra Pound provided an English translation of the poem, emphasizing Phlebas's former vitality and tragic end. Pound's rendering of the stanza highlights the sailor's physical allure and ill fortune:
Oubliait les cris des mouettes et la houle de Cornouaille,
Et les profits et les pertes, et la cargaison d'étain:
Un courant de sous-mer l'emporta très loin,
Le repassant aux étapes de sa vie antérieure.
Figurez-vous donc, c'était un sort pénible;
Cependant, ce fut jadis un bel homme, de haute taille.[10]
Phlebas the Phoenician, drowned a fortnight since,In Pound's version, Phlebas is depicted as the "fairest of men," born in a caul—a protective amniotic membrane symbolizing destined seafaring—whose luck turned at age forty, leading to his watery demise where bones are scoured by subaqueous flows.[12] The translation underscores his postmortem drift, evoking a beauty lost to indifferent natural forces.[13] The poem first appeared in the September 1918 issue of The Little Review, alongside other Eliot works like "Sweeney Among the Nightingales," and was reprinted in his 1920 collection Poems.[13] This early incarnation of Phlebas provided a self-contained moral vignette, later adapted and amplified in Eliot's The Waste Land.
Forgot the cries of gulls and the Cornish sea-swell,
And the profits and the losses, and the cargo of tin:
A current under the sea took him far away,
Carrying him through the stages of his former life.
Imagine then, it was a hard fate;
Yet once he was a handsome man, of good stature.[11]
In "The Waste Land"
In T. S. Eliot's modernist poem The Waste Land, Phlebas the Phoenician features prominently in Part IV, titled "Death by Water," which consists of just 10 lines and serves as the shortest section of the five-part work.[1] This appearance is foreshadowed early in Part I, "The Burial of the Dead," during Madame Sosostris's tarot reading, where she identifies "the drowned Phoenician Sailor" among the cards and warns, "Fear death by water."[1] The character builds briefly on Phlebas's earlier depiction as a drowned sailor in Eliot's 1918 French-language poem "Dans le Restaurant."[14] The section presents Phlebas's drowning in a detached, rhythmic narrative, emphasizing his dissolution into the sea:Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,This excerpt depicts Phlebas, a merchant sailor, succumbing passively to the ocean currents, with his bones scattered and body drawn into a whirlpool, underscoring a process of forgetting and transformation.[1] Within the poem's overall structure, "Death by Water" acts as a pivotal interlude, shifting from the fragmented depictions of urban decay and interpersonal disconnection in the preceding sections to a serene yet ominous moment of individual dissolution.[15] Eliot's endnotes connect Phlebas to broader fertility myths, referencing James George Frazer's The Golden Bough and its discussion of drowned vegetation gods, such as those associated with seasonal renewal and death cycles.[1] The Waste Land was first published in the inaugural issue of Eliot's literary magazine The Criterion in October 1922, followed by its appearance in the November 1922 issue of The Dial.[16] The published version resulted from extensive editing by Ezra Pound, who reduced the original manuscript—initially over 1,000 lines long—by approximately half, streamlining sections like "Death by Water" from a longer narrative into its concise form.[16]
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.[1]