"Death by Water" is by far the shortest of the five parts of The Waste Land. Eliot's drafts contained a long description of a shipwreck, but Ezra Pound insisted that this detracted from the force of the poem as a whole and advised Eliot to cut it out, retaining only a brief vignette about what happens to the dead body of Phlebas.

The Phoenicians were a seafaring civilization, so it is a safe assumption that, even if Phlebas was not a sailor by profession, he would have been familiar with the sea and accustomed to being on board a ship. The ship, however, apart from being the vessel that allows you to cross the sea, is also the thing that separates you from it. In death, Phlebas is no longer separate from the sea. He is part of it, food for the fish, rolled about by the current. He no longer has a mind to take him above the sea (to the "cry of gulls") or away to the land (with thoughts of "profit and loss"). The section ends with an invocation to the seafarer who is still alive and on his ship to "Consider Phlebas." This turns "Death by Water" into an epitaph for Phlebas, employing the traditional form of a call to those who are still alive that they should reflect upon death and the dead.