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.
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
Reomember us - if at all - not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed 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.
WHAT IS THE OCCASION?
“The Hollow Men” portrays a poetic consciousness in which intense nostalgia for a state of heavenly purity conflicts with the paradoxical search for a long-lasting form of order through acts of denial and alienation.
WHO IS THE SPEAKER?
An unnamed man
HOW DO THE PATTERNS WORK TOGETHER?
To the common observation that “The Hollow Men” expresses the depths of Eliot’s despair, one must add that the poet in a sense `chooses´ despair as the only acceptable alternative to the inauthentic existence of the unthinking inhabitants of the waste land.
“The Hollow Men” is an episodic free verse poem. Eliot constructs a desolate world, “death’s dream kingdom,” to explore humankind’s evasion from spiritual intention. The focus of the poem is on the hollow men’s inability to interact with each other and with the transcendental spirituality that is their only hope. The form and range of techniques employed by the poet foreground this predicament and highlight its broad applicability. The title of the poem draws our attention to the importance of the collective personae. The hollow men represent all humankind, and their tragic existence –the poem suggests- concerns us all.
The poem’s despair and disillusionment are no illustration of weakness; they are perfectly objective, because they are essential moments in the progress of the soul, as in the progress of traditional Christian mystic. Principles of intellectual order control the despair of “The Hollow Men” as well, in the way the text consciously evaluates experience in abstract terms, distinguishes between antithetical states of being and establishes, both in form and subject matter, the archetype of the Negative Way as an alternative to disorder as well as to the illusory order of visionary experience.
The formal strategy of “The Hollow Men,” like its thematic content, seems designed to demonstrate how effectively the Shadow of the inarticulate falls between the conception and the creation of an artistic work. Formal aspects of the poem imitate the characteristics of the hollow men it portrays. For example, their desire to “avoid speech” finds a counterpart in the poem’s paucity of utterance: the technique of constant repetition and negation manages to employ only about 180 different words in a work 420 words long. The “Paralyzed force, gesture without motion” applies not only to the men themselves but also to the poem as a whole, which exhibits little narrative progression in the conventional sense and avoids verbs of direct action.
As the hollow men “grope together and whisper meaninglessly,” so the poem itself gropes toward a conclusion only to end in hollow abstraction, broken prayer and the meaningless circularity of a children’s rhyme. The conscious reduction of poetic expression to a bare minimum does away with metaphor and simile and produces a final section of the poem almost completely devoid of modifiers. The poem avoids capitulation to the silence of the inarticulate by relying on a highly structured syntax that tends to order experience in terms of binary opposition: “Shape without form, shade without color or Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act.” The quality of a poetic style marked by verbal austerity and relentless negation forms a structural counterpart to a thematic strategy that repudiates the validity of human experience at every level. In modern existential terms as well as those of traditional Christianity, the Negative Way leads ultimately to an encounter with the nothingness, which, paradoxically, can inspire the individual with faith in God.
The central images of the poem are death’s kingdoms and the eyes. The first mention of the eyes serves to foreground the lack of direction of the hollow men. Those who “have crossed... to death’s other kingdom” do so with “direct eyes” –the very guidance which the hollow men refuse to acknowledge. In their land, “The eyes are not here,” yet their hope rests on the prospect of these shy eyes reappearing “as the perpetual star, multifoliate rose.” The star is another recurrent symbol, which draws attention to the plight of the hollow men. Their landscape is one of “fading stars [which] twinkle” barely enough to illuminate the image of a “dead man’s hand.” We are given the impression that soon their landscape will silently descend into darkness. The images of this landscape construct the hollow men as being resigned to a state of suspension, paralyzed by their own inability to turn conception into creation, emotion into response; spiritual redemption into their only hope. The poem privileges these supernatural symbols–eyes, stars, death’s kingdoms- over the natural. The hollow men are sightless, colorless, immobile and barely able to speak, while at the same time divine images linger in the landscape. The effect is to highlight a man as a finite creature distinct from the transcendental. The “deliberate disguises” that man makes for himself fail to hide the ultimate truth about our tragic existence.
“The Hollow Men” explores this boundary situation in its images of finality or extremity and in a thematic structure comprising two different states of being. The poem’s speaker anticipates with dread that final meeting; the men grope together “in this last of meeting places;” the final section, in its generalized abstraction of all that has gone before, tells us that “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.”