361. DSC 101: The Hollow Men (4)
1.The Hollow Men
T. S. Eliot
1888 –1965
A penny for the Old Guy
I
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
II
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.
IV
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.
V
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
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on July 20, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
2. T. S. Eliot
Born in Missouri on September 26, 1888, T. S. Eliot is the author of The Waste Land, which is now considered by many to be the most influential poetic work of the twentieth century.
“The Hollow Men” is found in T. S. Eliot’s Poems, 1909–1925 (Faber & Faber Limited, 1925). Literary critics Frank Kermode and John Hollander, in their book, British Modern Literature (Oxford University Press, 1973) note: “[Thomas Stearns] Eliot said in an interview that ‘The Hollow Men’ originated ‘out of separate poems … That’s one way in which my mind does seem to have evolved through the years poetically—doing things separately and then seeing the possibility of focusing them together, altering them, making a kind of whole of them.’ The first four sections had all appeared separately before the publication of the whole, in 1925. Some of the material was originally in ‘The Waste Land.’ The Hollow Men are like the city crowds of ‘The Waste Land,’ the damned who are so because of a lack of spiritual reality, even their sins lacking violence and conviction. The first references are, then, Dantean. There is a contrast with the blessed; their ‘direct eyes’ are avoided in [Section] II, where the hollowness of the Hollow Men begets scarecrow imagery.”
3. Summary
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.[1]
When asked in 1958 if he would write these lines again, Eliot said he would not. According to Henry Hewes: "One reason is that while the association of the H-bomb is irrelevant to it, it would today come to everyone's mind. Another is that he is not sure the world will end with either. People whose houses were bombed have told him they don't remember hearing anything."[8] Mort Sahl (circa 1962) paraphrased the lines as an ironic commentary on modern marriage: "This is the way her world ends, not with a whim but with a banker".
4.
crossed with direct eyes, to death's other kingdom [...]".[2] Eliot describes how they wish to be seen "[...] not as lost/Violent souls, but only/As the hollow men/The stuffed men [...]".[2]
As the poem enters section five, there is a complete breakdown of language. The Lord's Prayer and what appears to be a lyric change of "Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush" are written until this devolution of style ends with the final stanza, maybe the most quoted of Eliot's poetry:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.[1]
4. The Hollow Men by T. S. Eliot: Critical Analysis
It is most logical to consider The Hollow Men (1925) immediately after 'The Waste Land' because it is the most nearly related to 'The Waste Land'. It is, in some ways, a continuation of the earlier poem and, in others, it marks a departure from its predecessor. Like 'The Waste Land' it should be regarded as a series of poems rather than as one single poem, most of which is made up out of the lines Ezra Pound deleted from The Waste Land.
T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
The poem certainly bears a strong thematic resemblance to the waste land theme. 'The Hollow Men' is a meditation on the subject of human nature in this world and on the relationship of this world to another, the world of death, or eternity. The Hollow Men is also a new poem as regards its music and its final emotional significance.
The Hollow Men is remarkable for its music. The short lines, the faltering rhythms, the subdued, irregular rhymes help in producing a lamenting music regarding the condition of the Hollow Men. We are not told who they are, where they are or why they are in their present abode. They seem to be in a timeless region.
There is little hope of redemption for the Hollow Men as the poem ends with a 'whimper'. The word 'whimper' suggests the theme of rebirth. It is the first faint querulous sound which shows that a child is born and is alive. It is a sign of hope and salvation. The hope of salvation is present, although very faintly, for the Hollow Men, but there is little assurance that the hope of salvation will be accepted because the shadow prevents the Hollow Men from attaining the given salvation.
The hollow men wait for the final destruction because between now and then there is only an endless series of birth, death, and rebirth which is inescapable and which is, in itself, a waste land not only because it is inevitable, but because it offers no salvation from the wheel on which they turn. The eyes and the rose may well be symbols like the Holy Grail; a salvation sought but unattainable. The hollow men, like the knights of the Grail legends, quest for salvation, but because they are blind, spiritually and physically, they cannot find what they seek. The poem is, therefore, an impressive symbolic picture of an age without belief, without meaning and its tone is one of rankling despair.
In its images the poem seems to contain in epitome both what goes before and what is to come after. The opening images of the guys, the scarecrows tossing in the wind of the second section, the better compressed metaphor of "this broken jaw of our lost kingdoms" recalling 'the dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit' of 'The Waste Land', and the rewriting of the nursery rhyme, with the prickly pear in place of the mulberry bush are like samples of the images we find in such profusion in the Preludes, Gerontion and The Waste Land. But mingled with these are traditional poetic images of stars - 'a fading star' and 'the perpetual star' - of 'a tree swinging' and voices 'in the wind's singing' and of 'sunlight on a broken column.' These, with the Dantesque 'gathered on this beach of the timid river', and the unexpected introduction of religious symbol of the 'multifoliate rose' from The Divine Comedy point forward to the imagery of Ash Wednesday, and Four Quartets. And the use of these images as recurring symbols and of the potent word 'kingdom' to lead up to the broken petitions from the Lord's Prayer, anticipate the treatment of imagery in the later poems.
T. S. Eliot has provided two epigraphs for The Hollow Men 'Mistah Kurtz - he dead' and 'A Penny for the Old Guy'. The first epigraph shows a basic contrast and the second points to a basic resemblance with the Hollow Men. The Hollow Men are antithetic to Mistah Kurtz, but they resemble the 'Old Guy'. Mistah Kurtz, the hero of Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness is better than the Hollow Men because he is dead and they are deadened. There is a likeness between the Hollow Men and the 'Old Guy' or the effigy of Guy Fawkes because the latter is also a hollow man. The protagonist is, in fact, one of the stuffed dummies who symbolizes the condition of the sensitive part of humanity in the modern wasteland.