The general point of view may be described as classicist in literature, a royalist in politics, and
    anglo-catholic in religion.
           -T.S. Eliot describing his worldview

Did T.S. Eliot have a sense of humor?  I don't know; but, I sure as heck hope so.  Because as we reach its end, the greatest poet of the 20th Century seems destined to be remembered as the guy who wrote Cats.  His banishment from the canon was probably inevitable, what with being a white male Christian and the whiff of anti-Semitism wafting from him, but if he ever had a chance to cling to his spot on the basis of his early classics like The Wasteland and Prufrock, works like The Hollow Men pretty much guaranteed he would be consigned to oblivion.  For this poem, while not as coherent an attack on Modern values or lack of said, as the writings of someone like C.S. Lewis, is certainly one of the most eloquent.

    THE HOLLOW MEN (1927)

    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 rat's feet over broken glass
    In our dry cellar

    Shape without form, shade without color,
    Paralyzed 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 the cactus land
    Here the stone images
    Are raised, here they recieve
    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 existance
    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 wouldn't pretend to understand all of this, nor exactly what it is he's trying to say, but I do know what it says to me.  I take it as an indictment of Modern man and the failure of confidence that characterizes us.  The epigraph about Mr. Kurtz, from Conrad's Heart of Darkness (see Review), seems to harken back longingly for even such monstrous men who at least believed in what they were doing, however horrific the results.  It sets up a natural contrast to the hollowness of Modern man , who fundamentally believes in nothing and is, therefore, empty at the core of his being, like a Guy Fawkes dummy.

Two other powerful images really appeal to me.  The comparison of the sound of modern voices to "rat's feet over broken glass" aptly dismisses all of the psycho babble and faux spirituality of the age, all of modernity's futile effort to replace the beliefs that have been discarded.  And, of course, the great lines, "This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper" remind me of an argument that I used to enjoy during the Cold War when such melodramatics seemed more appropriate; that it would be better to just juke it out with the USSR, just let the missiles fly, than to gradually succumb to Communist domination.  Of course, this seems like the product of unbalanced minds now that we've triumphed, but think back to things like Dr. Strangelove and you get a feel for the tenor of the confrontation between absolutists and appeasers.  I for one preferred the bang to the whimper.

This is a powerful poem that rewards repeated readings, revealing different interpretations and images with each successive return.

(Reviewed:27-Dec-99)

Grade: (B+) Orrin C. Judd

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