The Hollow Men

The Hollow Men by T.S Eliot

Mistah Kurtz—he dead.

A penny for the Old Guy

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or rats’ feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,

Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed

With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom

Remember us—if at all—not as lost

Violent souls, but only

As the hollow men

The stuffed men.

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams

In death’s dream kingdom

These do not appear:

There, the eyes are

Sunlight on a broken column

There, is a tree swinging

And voices are

In the wind’s singing

More distant and more solemn

Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer

In death’s dream kingdom

Let me also wear

Such deliberate disguises

Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves

In a field

Behaving as the wind behaves

No nearer—

Not that final meeting

In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land

This is cactus land

Here the stone images

Are raised, here they receive

The supplication of a dead man’s hand

Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this

In death’s other kingdom

Waking alone

At the hour when we are

Trembling with tenderness

Lips that would kiss

Form prayers to broken stone.

The eyes are not here

There are no eyes here

In this valley of dying stars

In this hollow valley

This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places

We grope together

And avoid speech

Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless

The eyes reappear

As the perpetual star

Multifoliate rose

Of death’s twilight kingdom

The hope only

Of empty men.

Here we go round the prickly pear

Prickly pear prickly pear

Here we go round the prickly pear

At five o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea

And the reality

Between the motion

And the act

Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception

And the creation

Between the emotion

And the response

Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire

And the spasm

Between the potency

And the existence

Between the essence

And the descent

Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is

Life is

For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

(Source: http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/784/)

In this essay the poem “The Hollow Men” by T. S. Eliot is going to be analysed focusing on, in my opinion, its main topic, the emptiness of society in general and the impossibility to find any meaning in this world.

T.S Eliot, to start his poem, uses a quote from “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad: “Mistah Kurtz- he dead”. In the novel Mr. Kurtz was a European trader who went to Africa looking for richness and forgetting everything that had to do with ethics and morality, becoming an empty person, a hollow man.

The second quote refers to the commemoration of the failure of the Guy Fawkes Night. It celebrates the failure of the Gunpowder Plot, in which a group of Catholic conspirators attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament in London on the night when the Protestant King James I (James VI of Scotland) was within its walls – the evening of 5th November 1605.(cominganarchy)

The first verse “we are the hollow men”, implies the reader inside the poem in the sense that the poem is talking about ourselves, even about the author himself. It is not talking about someone unrelated to us, so what the author gets is an implication from part of the reader. it seems through this verse that we all are empty, we all lack spirituality. The author carries on with this idea along the first part of the poem, composed by tree stanzas. We can observe it in the metaphors “we are the stuffed men”( v2) , “ headpiece filled with straw”(v4) and in the comparisons “ “our dried voices, when (v5)… are quite meaningless (v7) as wind in dry grass (v8) or rats feet over broken glass (v9). We find the same idea in the paradoxes of verses 11 and 12 as it is not possible to find shape without form, shade without colour it makes no sense, so there is no meaning in it. Then, Eliot refers to the dead “those who have crossed” (v13) “with direct, eyes, to death’s other kingdom”, meaning they had to face death without a possibility to avoid it.

The author constantly makes use of repetition along the entire poem, so the word “eyes” appears more than once. In the second part the author says “Eyes I dare not meet in dreams”. Here we can interpret Eliot’s fear to death. In part IV, the author makes allusion to the eyes again “the eyes are not here, there are no ayes here”… “in this hollow valley”, it seems it refers to the lack of spirituality in the world because “ the valley is hollow” as their people are.

The idea of being afraid of death is repeated when Eliot shows his desire to hide himself from death. He pretends to use a “deliberate disguises” to hide himself from death. We have to emphasise the connotations of such disguises, so all of them connote death somehow “rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves”. The question here is why are we afraid of death? it can be because our emptiness and lack of spirituality.

The idea of “hollow Valley” is repeated in part III referring to it as “the dead land” “cactus land”. In this stanza we can also interpret the necessity of running away from this land, that’s to say, the necessity to stop being hollow, empty.

In part V, in the second, third and fourth stanza, when he repeats at the end of each stanza that “the shadow falls” Eliot is stating that having abstract good intention does not excuse anyone from being hollow.

The poem can be interpreted in many ways, however the idea of emptiness persist from the beginning to the end. In the last stanza Eliot repeats “this is the way the world ends” three times which adds weight to the line that follows “not with a bang but a whimper”. Eliot uses this method to emphasise the last verse. This one, means we will not probably notice the end of the world because it won’t be caused by a natural phenomenon but by ourselves, the hollow men. In other words, here Eliot states a warning about the path he sees this world is taking. He sees it all coming to an end not in some apocalyptic catastrophe, as in the Bible, but through mankind allowing himself to slowly decay and degrade.

Sources:

· http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/eliot/hollow.htm Jed Esty, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ( 20-03 -2006)

· http://www.eliteskills.com/c/13938 . webmaster_jimmy@yahoo.com (22-03-2006)

· http://www.123helpme.com/assets/4582.html . help@123HelpMe.com (22-03-2006)

· http://www.cominganarchy.com/archives/2005/11/05/a-penny-for-the-old-guy/. Chirol. (01-06-2006)

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Academic year 2005/2006