The poem ‘The Hollow Men’ shows the various thoughts, emotions and journey’s of men who have died, but do not belong in one particular afterlife because they have done no good, but done no evil. The poem is saying ‘you should do something with your life, because then you will have a determined afterlife. If you do evil things in your life, you will go to the inferno, but at least you are going somewhere. If you do good things, you go to paradise. That is the best. But don’t just do nothing, because you will end up standing around waiting for nothing in an empty desert, like the hollow men.’ Eliot read and admired works of Dante Alighieri. In his work Divina Commedia Dante describes his beliefs on the afterlife; that for the “lost/violent souls” there was an inferno, for the not so bad souls there was a purgatory, and for the good there was a paradise. Eliot alludes to these, but also creates an “other kingdom”, a limbo for “hollow men”. This idea of Dante’s may have been the inspiration for this poem. The voice heard by the reader is the voice of the poem, but after closer examination is also the voice of Eliot expressing his admiration for Dante and his beliefs on the afterlife.
Like all other poets, Eliot uses poetic techniques to create the voice of his poem. Eliot alludes to Dante’s three kingdoms, and in I and the epigraph alludes to the effigies used to represent Guy Fawkes and the part he played in history with the gunpowder plot. (The hollow men are likened to the effigies.) Another technique Eliot uses is structure. The poem is broken into sections, representing different stages and emotions while travelling through the afterlife. Eliot repeats “broken glass” “broken column” “broken stone” “broken jaw”. This use of repetition says to the reader that these men are broken, hollow men. He also repeats “this is the way the world ends”, emphasise that the world indeed does end, and the way it ends is inevitable. (“a whimper”) Another important part of the voice of the poem is the title ‘The Hollow Men’. It firstly draws attention to the subject matter, this poem relates to fellow men. The title immediately generates sympathy for the personas, as nobody should be or feel hollow. It was derived by Eliot from two texts: The Hollow Land and The Broken Men. This also stresses the emptiness these men feel, as does the fragmentation of a ‘hollow man’s’ speech in V. Eliot again alludes at the end of the poem in “Not with a bang but a whimper”. The “bang” is what Guy Fawkes hoped for, but a whimper is what he got, because he was arrested before he could blow anything up with his gunpowder. These techniques transmit to the readers the voice of the poem so that it may influence their reading of the poem, and their response to it.
The voice projected from ‘Journey of the Magi’ can be heard with more clarity than with ‘The Hollow Men’ due to the subject matter being more accessible. The poem tells the journey of the three wise men from the East (Matthew ii, 1-12) to see the infant Jesus in the first person retrospective point of view. It portrays this as a tough and trying, tiring journey that took a lot of determination and faith to complete. Eliot portrays the magi to be unhappy after the journey, because he didn’t want the old dispensation that he was used to end. The voice Eliot intended the readers to hear and respond to says that the magi endured this journey, they saw Jesus and brought him gifts, and they fulfilled their holy duties, but they had their bad times like everyone else. They wished for “the silken girls bringing sherbet”, and they wanted to go back to their “summer palaces on slopes”. The voice is saying, even the holiest and most God-like of men are fallible. All men have their doubts, their unrealistic desires, and all men are sometimes selfish and arrogant, even those who are praised for their good deeds and holiness. The voice of Eliot is present in this poem through the subject matter. The poem was written in 1927, the same year he was baptised into the Anglo-Catholic church, a religion that celebrates the journey of the magi and the birth of Jesus. Perhaps to honour his new religion, he has written this poem, but still retains the cynicism towards people and society that at the time made him so unique by showing the weaknesses and the flaws of the magus. By doing this Eliot has made his voice, his influences and stances on things, heard by the readers through the poem.
The techniques used in this poem to create the meaning and voice of the poem include structure. The first stanza of the poem expresses the worst part of the journey, this is emphasised by the long drawn-out stanza, and also by the long drawn-out lines of the sentences in the stanza. The repetition of “And” in this stanza creates the idea that this journey, like the land they were travelling on, just kept going “and” going. The language used also creates the meaning that this was not a pleasant journey: “cursing” “hostile” “unfriendly” “dirty” are used in the first stanza to describe the journey. To convey to the readers how holy these magi were, Eliot uses prolepsis to make it seem as if the men received ‘prophetic suggestions of future events’ of Christ’s white horse, miracles and crucifixion. This made them seem extraordinary and creating the poem’s meaning, and voice. these techniques combined to form the voice of the poem, which says to the reader that ‘these men were great, but they were also just men’. For different people, the voice of this poem may have been received differently, but every reader of this poem would have a response to it, because there is a very distinctive voice that projects itself from the poem for all readers to hear.
I chose to study these poems in depth because once I found the meaning of them, and heard the voice that Eliot was trying to project through the poems, I responded to them positively and with a lot of emotion. I also related to these poems as the voice of the poem was saying things to me that I have thought about before. I also responded well and with awe to these poems because the subject matter of them is still relevant now. We still don’t know what happens in the afterlife and so are wary of what we do in this life, and the people who we consider great people (eg. Political leaders) are still flawed. There is most definitely a distinct voice in all poetry, especially in T.S. Eliot’s, and voices of these poems influence the readers response to a large extent. If voices were not heard through poetry, poetry would not have had the effect on society and history that it has had.
Bibliography
B.C. Southam A Student’s Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot Faber and Faber Limited, London, 1994
M. Herbert T.S. Eliot Selected Poems YORK PRESS London, 2000
T.S. Eliot Selected Poems Faber and Faber Limited, London, 2002
Nicol, Andrew (April 2004)
T.S. Eliot To-Day September 1918
M. Herbert T.S. Eliot Selected Poems York Press London 2000
