T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”
The speaker in T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” is bemoaning the spiritually dry direction to which his culture is headed.
Introduction and Text of “The Hollow Men”
One of T. S. Eliot’s most anthologized poems “The Hollow Men” offers up a dreary prospect for the speaker’s generation. Art seems to be dying because of a spiritual dryness that whispers despair, loneliness, and hopelessness.
More dire than his comedic drama “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and nearly as devastatingly ugly as his horror-filled “Preludes,” this poem sinks itself so deep into melancholy from the hollow men-stuffed men straw-headed disasters to the final flailing attempt at prayer.
The two opening epigraphs included before the poem set the tone for a soulless, tragic-comedic farce that ultimately results from the blandness against which the speaker rails. The first epigraph, “Mistah Kurtz–he dead,” is a quotation from Joseph Conrad’s novella, The Heart of Darkness. The second quotation, “A penny for the Old Guy,” refers to Guy Fawkes Day, when children beg for pennies to buy trinkets to commemorate that day.
The Hollow Men
Mistah Kurtz—he dead
A penny for the Old Guy
I
We are the hollow men
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.
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 this 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 with a whimper.
Reading by T. S. Eliot
Reading by Marlon Brando
Commentary on “The Hollow Men”
The speaker in T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” bemoans with ugly, degrading images of the bland, vapid world into which art and culture seemed to be moving. Eliot’s prescience remains remarkable; he so clearly predicted the sad state of Western art and culture that resulted from the postmodern era ethos.
First Section: A Scarecrow Culture
I
We are the hollow men
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.
The speaker describes himself and his culture as hollow yet stuffed. They are stuffed with straw. They resemble scarecrows. Their voices are dry, and when they whisper to one another, their words lack meaning, are as empty as “wind in dry grass / Or rats feet over broken glass.”
These men are shapeless, colorless; their life force is paralyzed, and when they move, as to gesture, there is simply no motion. Their compatriots who have died are likely not to remember them as violent souls but instead as “the hollow men / The stuffed men.” The ugly images have begun and will carry the message of lack of hope or any brightness on the horizon.
The contorted images of the painful yet anesthetized walking dead ignite the fire that burned into postmodernism its virtual absence of desire for beauty and truth. As art explodes into personal effusion, the culture suffers from neurosis as admirers become less and less inspired for making life worth living.
The postmodern conundrum rattles its empty gourd producing only a faint whisper of anything resembling sound; night terrors embalm the living—all this while egos become more and more bloated through arrogance and false intellectual arguments.
Second Section: Non-Functioning Eyes
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
The speaker asserts that in this dry, dead world, people cannot look at one another. Although the eyes may function properly, they still focus only on a broken column. Voices are as the eyes, virtually useless as if they were in the winds singing. The voices are farther away than a fading star.
The speaker then shifts from mere statement to a slight command, supplicating to be “no nearer / In death’s dream kingdom.” He also asks to wear the garb of a scarecrow. Essentially, he is praying that death does not take him yet. He is not ready for that “final meeting, / In the twilight kingdom.”
The attempt to insert a prayer rings as hollow as the men described in the poem. The speaker’s prayer remains a secret wish that he can outlive the present dismaying trend of emptiness that seems to be overtaking his culture.
He does not desire that “twilight kingdom” but craves that life would spring up around him, instead of the desert that is forming from the dearth of sensible thought. The atmosphere seems to shed it electric color, becoming a mausoleum for dead letters.
Third Section: What to Pray to?
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 speaker now turns to describing the landscape, which is dead; it is cactus land where stone images are raised. Only dead men pray here under the twinkle of a fading star. He asks, “Is it like this in death’s other kingdom?”
He refers to this world as death’s dream kingdom and beyond death as death’s other kingdom. Thus he wonders what the soul experiences after death. Also, he wonders if the soul will be alone, if trembling with tenderness, will lips still be able to kiss and will they be able to pray, and will they pray to broken stone?
The image of praying to “broken stone” reveals the hard, harsh reality of a grand failure to pray to a living Creator. The postmodern mind virtually obliterated spirituality from life and art, to such an extent that nothing was left to seek.
Full of themselves with ego-tripping maniacal arrogance, those hollow creatures made God in their own filtered image and then with cock-sureness announced that He was the one Whom they found wanting.
Fourth Section: Dry, Hollow, Stuffed, Empty
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 this tumid river
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.
Returning to the eyes, the speaker laments again that these dry, hollow, straw-stuffed men cannot see. They exist in a place where the stars are dying; they find themselves in this hollow valley, which is nothing more than this “broken jaw of our lost kingdoms.”
This group of hollow men meet for a last time where they “grope together / And avoid speech.” They are gathered on a riverbank, and despite the river’s being swollen, they remain dry and sightless.
However, there may be a glimmer of hope that might reappear as the perpetual star or “Multifoliate rose,” which would emerge from death’s twilight kingdom—the place between death’s dream kingdom and death’s other kingdom, a kind of purgatory.
Despite the constant drum beat of spiritual dryness in the poem, it leaves open the possibility that true spiritual striving could open itself again in the hearts of certain seekers. Because the hollow men remain sightless, they likely will never open their eyes, even though they could, or the speaker at least seems to keep a glimmer of hope alive.
Fifth Section: A Lunatic Rant
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 with a whimper.
The speaker sounding rather like a lunatic—after all, such a state of dryness, hollowness, stuffed-with-straw bitterness could lead its victims nowhere else; thus he recites nursery-rime-like ditties, such as, “Here we go round the prickly pear,” which is likely suggested to him by “Here we go round the mulberry bush,” but instead of a fruit tree, the speaker chooses a cactus to further symbolize the dryness of his theme.
The speaker then makes a set of assertions that ultimately form the basis of the philosophical stance taken in the poem: “Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act / Falls the Shadow.” Everything on this earth is covered and disguised by a shadow.
That shadow is the illusion that humankind is separated from its divine origin. This world operates as if it belongs to the kingdoms of death, but in fact, “Thine is the Kingdom.” The speaker affirms that ultimately the Divine Reality is the only reality that controls all the imaginary kingdoms of humankind.
Flighty from his intoxicating philosophy, the speaker descends again into a nursery-rime-like chant, repeating three times, “This is the way the world ends,” and finally claiming that it ends “Not with a bang but a whimper.”
Possibly serving as Fred Hoyle’s motivation for the naming of the Big Bang Theory of origin, the speaker having experienced the nothingness of modern life finds it likely that the end of this drab existence is not worth so big a spectacle as would be produced by a bang.
Instead of a big bang at its end, it will probably just snivel and sob itself to death. Thus despite the insertion of a hopeful thought and prayer, the piece concludes with virtually the exact same pessimism with which it began.
