T. S. Eliot and his work were at the forefront of the modernist poetry movement. His lengthy poem ‘‘The Hollow Men’’ was written at the height of his career. Indeed, it was published only three years after the release of Eliot’s most famous epic poem, The Waste Land (1922). Parts of ‘‘The Hollow Men’’ were published in the periodicals Chapbook, Commerce, Criterion, and Dial from 1924 to 1925. The poem then appeared in its final cohesive form in Eliot’s 1925 collection Poems, 1909–1925.
‘‘The Hollow Men’’ largely builds on the themes in The Waste Land, specifically the need for death to take place as a means to make way for the new. Both poems additionally share the same source of inspiration: Joseph Conrad’s 1902 novella Heart of Darkness. ‘‘The Hollow Men’’ also alludes to or is heavily influenced by several works, including Dante Alighieri’s fourteenth-century masterpiece Divine Comedy and William Shakespeare’s 1599 play Julius Caesar. A historical allusion to Guy Fawkes Day (a British holiday) also appears in the poem.
Summary
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
The stuffed men.
In a ten-line verse, the speakers claim to be empty yet full, evoking references to the straw men burned in effigy in England on Guy Fawkes Day (a holiday that commemorates the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot conspiracy to blow up the British Parliament and King James 1st on November 5, 1605).Made of straw, these men are without depth and significance, like the grass in the breeze, or like the movement of rodents over debris in the basement.
The next verse is a couplet in which numerous contradictory terms (such as the idea of being colorless, yet possessing a hue) are introduced. Notably, there is no concrete indication of what these paradoxes are referring to.
In the following six-line stanza, references are made to those who have died and passed on to the afterlife. The speakers declare that the dead may think of them, and if they do, they think of them as empty yet full.
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
This section appears to be narrated by a singular speaker as opposed to the plural speakers in section I. In the first ten-line stanza, the speaker states that in his fantasies of the afterlife, there are eyes he cannot bring himself to look at and that are not present. But in the afterlife, those eyes are like the daylight and there is also a tree that moves. There are words in the breeze that are as somber as a dying star.
In the next eight-line stanza, the speaker says he does not want to get any closer to the afterlife and wants to wear costumes to hide himself from it. He wants to be as elusive as the breeze.
In the section’s final couplet, the speaker again notes that he wishes to avoid the ultimate assembly that will occur in the afterlife.
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.
In this section, the narrator reverts to the plural voice, but the verses again refer largely to the land of death. In the first six-line stanza of the section, reference is made to that land as a desert. There are also stone statues there, elevated and worshiped by the dead. All of this takes place beneath a dying star. (Here, the reference to the dying star is repeated from the first stanza of section II).
Then, in the second (seven-line) stanza, the speaker indicates that there is another afterlife, and that the previous stanza refers to it. Furthermore, in this second afterlife the dead awake without company, just when they are filled with affection, like mouths meant for kissing. Instead, those mouths beseech the crumbling statues.
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.
The speakers open the section with a five-line stanza that again refers to the eyes that are absent (this image is initially mentioned in the first stanza of section II). In fact the eyes are missing from a vale filled with fading stars. The vale is as empty as the stuffed men (indeed, the same words used to describe them are used to describe the gorge). The vale is also described as the broken jaw of vanished empires.
In the following four-line stanza, this gorge is the final assembly place where the straw men feel their way as one. They do not speak and they come together on the shore of a swollen waterway.
The section’s third stanza is comprised of seven lines. In it, the speakers state that without eyes, there is no sight. Should the eyes become present again, they will be an undying star, and a special type of rose representative of the church. This rose is also a reference to Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. In Dante, the rose symbolizes heaven. For the speakers in Eliot’s poem, this rose is the only hope of the hollow 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 section opens with a four-line italicized stanza of a nursery rhyme, an alteration of ‘‘Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush.’’ The mulberry bush, however, is replaced by a cactus plant, again referencing the desert imagery initially introduced in the first stanza of section III.
In the next five-line stanza, the speaker (or speakers, as this is unclear in the poem’s final section) says that a shadow lies in the space separating theory and practice, movement and deed.
Between the stanzas an italicized quotation from the Lord’s Prayer is set flush with the right margin.
The section’s third stanza is made up of five lines. Here the speaker states that the shadow falls in the space separating the idea and the creative act, the feeling and the reaction to it.
An italicized line declaring that life is not short follows, again set flush with the right margin.
In the following seven-line stanza, there are more descriptions of the shadow. It lies amidst the space between yearning and paroxysm, power and being, the core and the fall.
The single line from the Lord’s Prayer is repeated.
The section’s (and the poem’s) penultimate (next to last) stanza is three lines long. Each line is comprised of fragments from the three offset italicized lines that preceded it.
The final stanza is four italicized lines. The first three are identical, and the speaker says that this is how the apocalypse will be. Then, in the final line, the speaker says that the apocalypse will not take place with a great crash but with little more than a quiet moan.
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