Joe Bennett: T.S. Eliot and the other greats had an important message for us all

Joe Bennett talks about poets' poignant reminders for living life to the full. Photo / 123rf

OPINION

T.Eliot spells toilet backwards. I presume that’s why Thomas Stearns Eliot, the modernist poet, always insisted on being T.S. Eliot. Even the greatest poets were schoolboys at some time and subject to cruel teasing.

A hundred years ago Eliot published The Waste Land. Fifty years ago, I read it for the first time. I was 16. It baffled me. It made cultural references I did not get, switched into German or Sanskrit without warning or translation, and didn’t seem to tell a story. Nevertheless there were bits that sang to me, images that rang in my skull, passages that stuck.

Over the years I’ve re-read it a few times and parts of it still baffle me. But every time I read it, it seems a greater poem than it did the time before. And every time I come to the fourth of the five parts I am as thrilled and touched as I was the first time. Part four is entitled Death by Water and it is only eight lines long.

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,

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.

And if that doesn’t make your toes curl, if that doesn’t tickle your pleasure centre, if that doesn’t make you want to go back and read it again and commit it to memory, well, turn this page now and go read the share prices or what’s on telly.

The whole passage is a memento mori, a reminder that we will die. Such things were once more popular than they are now. John Donne, another poet, had a drawing made of himself in a burial shroud. He hung it by his bed so he should look on it every day. To us this may seem morbid. To Donne it was a reminder of the simple truth and a stimulus to action. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, as yet another poet put it, old time is still a-flying.

Who was Phlebas the Phoenician? The point is that it doesn’t matter. Whoever he was he isn’t now. Ditto Phoenicia which had been a prominent trading state around what is now Lebanon, but like Phlebas it has sunk beneath time’s waves and is no more.

Phlebas was clearly a trader, a man with a boat and a cargo, hawking his goods round the Eastern Mediterranean, concerned with short-term profit and loss, as we all are to some degree. But it’s come to nothing. The waters have rolled over his head, and even the cries of the gulls - there is no more mournful sound in nature - are lost to him now.

Look at the simplicity of the words, the clarity of it, the plangent monosyllables. And then that startling image of the current that “picked his bones in whispers”. Down there in the silence, the deep water is like an active pair of fingers dismantling his flesh, picking his bones clean. He is being reabsorbed into the world that spawned him. Phlebas the Phoenician is no one now, is food for the fish. His age, his youth, his very identity, all have surrendered to the deep sea swell, to the meaningless swirl of the whirlpool.

And then that final couplet, addressed to all of us who see ourselves as captain of our ship, steering our way through a life, proud of our status, our success, our name. Vanity, all is vanity. The deep sea awaits. “Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.” We should all write that on the fridge. It would do us good. We would live better.

Eliot was just 34 when he wrote The Waste Land. By some accounts he wasn’t the nicest man. But he’s long since gone the way of Phlebas, and unlike Phlebas he left poems behind. This one reads as freshly as the day he wrote it. It still seems modern. And in places it is true and it is beautiful.