Drowned Sailors: November 21, 2015

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 windward,
Consider Phlebas who was once handsome and tall as you.

T.S. Eliot  The Waste Land

But he himself remained high on his rock, like a drowned sailor on a rock.  I leant over the edge of the boat and fell down, he thought.  I went under the sea.  I have been dead, and yet am now

alive, but let me rest still; he begged (he was talking to himself again--it was awful, awful!); and as, before waking, the voices of birds and the sound of wheels chime and chatter in a queer harmony,

grow louder and louder and the sleeper feels himself drawing to the shores of life, so he felt himself drawing towards life, the sun growing hotter, cries sounding louder, something tremendous about

to happen.

Mrs. Dalloway (67)

The Waste Land was published in The Dial in November 1922 

The Hogarth Press edition came out in September 1923