What is the meaning of water in The Waste Land?

The shortest section of the poem, “Death by Water”
describes a man, Phlebas the Phoenician, who has died, apparently by drowning. In death
he has forgotten his worldly cares as the creatures of the sea have picked his body
apart. The narrator asks his reader to consider Phlebas and recall his or her own
mortality.

While this section appears on the page as a
ten-line stanza, in reading, it compresses into eight: four pairs of rhyming couplets.
Both visually and audibly, this is one of the most formally organized sections of the
poem. It is meant to recall other highly organized forms that often have philosophical
or religious import, like aphorisms and parables. The alliteration and the deliberately
archaic language (“o you,” “a fortnight dead”) also contribute to the serious, didactic
feel of this section.

The major point of this short section
is to rebut ideas of renewal and regeneration. Phlebas just dies; that’s it. Like
Stetson’s corpse in the first section, Phlebas’s body yields nothing more than products
of decay. However, the section’s meaning is far from flat; indeed, its ironic layering
is twofold. First, this section fulfills one of the prophecies of Madame Sosostris in
the poem’s first section: “Fear death by water,” she says, after pulling the card of the
Drowned Sailor. Second, this section, in its language and form, mimics other literary
forms (parables, biblical stories, etc.) that are normally rich in meaning. These two
features suggest that something of great significance lies here. In reality, though, the
only lesson that Phlebas offers is that the physical reality of death and decay triumphs
over all. Phlebas is not resurrected or transfigured. Eliot further emphasizes Phlebas’s
dried-up antiquity and irrelevance by placing this section in the distant past (by
making Phlebas a Phoenician).