An Escape for the Empty

Written for Dordt College literature class.

“The Hollow Men”

An Escape for the Empty

A model poet of his time, the highly-esteemed T.S. Eliot wrote that the only method for writing poetry is to be very intelligent (Poetry Foundation). Eliot was a master of language whose work incorporated his own experience and personality. His poetry is complex, filled with intricate literary elements and the thoughtful intelligence he knew was necessary to create striking poetry. Following Eliot’s work through the corridors of time reveals that the poet often wove his writing together, relating a piece of work to the one that came before it. This pattern is evident when studying the tone and placement of Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men”, which reveals Eliot’s own struggle with the horrors and disillusionment of life (Bush). “The Hollow Men” portrays Eliot’s shift from despair and emptiness toward the religious faith he discovers is his only escape.

The darkness that clouds the stanzas of “The Hollow Men” is seen as a sequel or extension of Eliot’s preceding poem, “The Waste Land”. The manner in which Eliot laces his work together is evident in how the despair and struggle from “The Waste Land” is transferred into the similarly heavy “The Hollow Men” (Bush). Eliot’s gloom is a product of the condition London is in after World War I. He identifies with the postwar generation while additionally coping with his father’s death and his wife’s poor health. The combination of these factors has left Eliot sketching emptiness and despair between the lines of his poems. He is being suffocated by the reality that his life is empty and meaningless.

Traces of emptiness are clearly found in Part I of “The Hollow Men”. Eliot uses imagery to paint a picture of two men whose heads are stuffed with straw. These men call themselves hollow because the straw represents the useless thoughts that fill their minds. They whisper quiet nothings to each other simply because they have no intelligent ideas to offer. Eliot uses this illustration to show that even those who believe they have extensive knowledge can still be as worthless as a paralyzed force or a gesture without motion. Eliot incorporates personal pronouns into this section and the next because the misery of emptiness imprisons him as well.

Throughout the next three sections of the poem, Eliot describes death’s frightening kingdom and its eerie elements. The most menacing components of the kingdom, found in Part II, are the eyes that the hollow men fear meeting even while they sleep. These eyes do not belong to a body, yet they still see the meaningless and doomed futures of the hollow men that the men themselves cannot even foresee. Eliot uses these eyes that exist now only in the kingdom to represent those who have gone to the kingdom before and know the dangers of living a meaningless life. They have experienced the doom that is sure to come upon the hollow men. However, the voices of those in the kingdom are lost in the wind and are as perceptible as a star fading from view. They cannot warn the hollow men of the fate that awaits them. Each of these shiver-inducing elements of death’s kingdom have caused the speaker in lines 29 through 38 to desire nothing more than to never come close to the kingdom (Williamson). Instead he wants to remain where the hollow men are, to be disguised like a scarecrow in a field wearing a “rat’s coat, crowskin, and crossed staves” (Elliot).

While the third and fourth parts of the poem continue to describe death’s kingdom, the voice changes. Part II is narrated by a hollow man who has not yet experienced the kingdom, while the narrator in Parts III and IV describe it through personal experience. The land is desert-like; it is empty and dead. Stone images are raised and they receive the supplication, or the worship, of the dead that surround them (Williamson). Line 44 screams hopelessness, for even the worship of the people who live in a dead, purposeless land is framed by fading stars. Their worship is rendered useless and meaningless. The inhabitants of death’s kingdom long for a purpose; they tremble for tenderness and desire a kiss but can only “form prayers to broken stone” (Eliot). The vivid language used in lines 53 through 56 to describe the hollow valley sends shivers down the spine and illustrates nothing but hopelessness.

Part V of Eliot’s poem contains a strange rendition of a nursery rhyme, replacing what should be ‘mulberry bush’ with ‘prickly pear’. “Here we go ‘round the prickly pear / At five o’clock in the morning. / Between the idea / And the reality…” (Eliot). The narrator feels he is running in circles around idea and reality, around potency and existence. The remainder of the poem speaks of a Shadow that falls between these elements, preventing one from understanding the difference between them. The Shadow, which may be Satan or some other form of evil, is aiming for an eternity of emptiness and despair (Williamson). The Shadow breaks connections between the mind and reality, and it is content to leave the world in a hollow state.

Eliot’s purpose for creating such a frightening afterlife is to address his fear of how hollow his own life has become. He struggles with feeling devoid of purpose and with seeing the emptiness of the lives of those around him. Eliot’s greatest fear becomes evident through “The Hollow Men”: that the life after death is just as hollow as the one he currently lives. He wants, like the hollow men, to stay away from death’s meaningless kingdom. He desires an eternity filled with purpose rather than whispers of quiet nothings. Eliot realizes that without discovering purpose and meaning in life, the lives of those who continue to live in emptiness will slip from the world “not with a bang, but a whimper” (Eliot). They will enter death’s kingdom quietly and insignificantly.

The final stanzas of the poem give traces of evidence that Eliot is beginning to discover the new purpose he is longing for. He incorporates the line “For Thine is the Kingdom” into the poem, which is a portion of the Lord’s Prayer. Eliot realizes that the emptiness can only be filled by faith. It was during this time in his life that Eliot reached out for religious support (Bush). The subtle faith aspect found in Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” becomes more evident in the works that follow. Works such as “Journey of the Magi”, “A Song for Simeon”, and “Triumphal March” all have explicitly religious aspects. Many of his readers were not prepared for his baptism into the Church of England in 1927 (Bush). Eliot was able to fill the hollow with the only true escape: faith in God.

T.S. Eliot was not the first poet to convey the hollowness of society through the words of a poem. A. E. Housman describes the same emptiness throughout his poem “Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff”. The characters in Housman’s poem, however, chose to fill the emptiness with alcohol, rather than the faith Eliot chose. Societal shallowness proved to trouble another poet of Eliot’s time as well. Marianne Moore (1887 – 1972) wrote of the excessive, useless thoughts that were being conveyed into poorly written poetry at the time. She, along with Eliot, had realized that minds can be stuffed with nothing, leaving them hollow. Eliot’s poem continues to ring true today, as many in society are missing purpose, striving to fill the void, and turning to the wrong things to do so. Just as A.E. Housman points out, alcohol and other temporary fillers cannot and will not succeed. Only the everlasting grace of God that Eliot came to grasp is an escape for the empty.

Works Cited

Ackroyd, Peter. T.S. Elliot A Life. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1984. Print

Bush, Ronald. "T.S. Eliot's Life and Career." Modern American Poetry. Ed. John A. Garraty.

American National Biography, 1999. Web. 24 Jan. 2013. <http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/eliot/life.htm>.

Eliot, T. S.. “The Hollow Men.” Poetry X. Ed. Jough Dempsey. 13 Jul 2003. 24 Jan. 2013

http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/784/>.

Landy, Alice S., and William R. Allen. Introduction to Literature. 6th ed. N.p.: Houghton Mifflin

Company, 2000. Print.

Montgomery, Marion. T.S. Elliot An Essay on the American Magus. N.p.: University of

Georgia Press, 1969. Print.

The Poetry Foundation. Harriet Monroe Poetry Foundation, n.d. Web. 24 Jan. 2013.

<http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/t-s-eliot>.

VanderMey, Randall, Verne Meyer, and John Van Rys. The College Writer. 3rd ed. N.p.: Heinle Learning, n.d. 361-63. Print.

Williamson, George. A Reader’s Guide to T.S. Eliot: A Poem by Poem Analysis. New York:

Octagon Books, 1979

The Hollow Men

T. S. Eliot

Mistah Kurtz—he dead.

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

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.