Death by Water, the forth section in The Waste Land, is easily the most important, though the shortest, because it contains the turn. The turn backs up the importance of water in the poem, and the entire theme of the turn is in fact water.
The whole section is about Phlebas the Phoenician sailor drowning. This is odd because until now, there has been this consistent lack of water. Now, there is so much water that it has killed someone. Water is usually a life giving force, it is needed to keep people alive. Water is essentially life itself. Too much life could result in death, such as a reduction of resources; too much water could also be death. So really, in this poem, life is killing itself. It is driving it's land into a wasteland and its people into a zombie like state of the living dead.
The main idea of the section is that though water is needed, too much of it will kill you. I believe that this section is also a foreshadow to the upcoming rain in section five. Why would the author go an entire poem stressing the fact that there is no water, and in one tiny section have too much water, if the water wasn't going to come in the end?
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