T.S. Eliot “Whispers of Immortality”

                This is probably one of the more difficult poems I have attempted to interpret thus far in the course. Starting with the title, I ask how the narrator is receiving these whispers. The first stanza seems to be an allusion to one who is familiar with death, but why is he brought up? “Webster was much possessed by death / And saw the skull beneath the skin” I interpret this to mean that there is someone who, when he looks at a person, easily imagines them as being dead, which is not too normal. But why is this important to the poem? “He knew that thought clings round dead limbs / Tightening its lusts and luxuries.” I feel like this is symbolic of dead limbs, or the body only and not the soul, is the part which wants and desires things. This answers my first question of why this man is familiar with death. It is because only in death do the material lusts and luxuries stay with the body, so it is by death that we separate ourselves from these thoughts. I suppose a moral of the first two stanzas could be that Immortality is not so good in that in it we never separate from these things. through immortality we are stuck to the thoughts that  cling round our limbs!