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“The
Hollow Men”
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.
...
Eliot once said that
the most persistent influence on his work was none other than Dante.
In 1932 Eliot wrote a collection of essays entitled The Sacred Wood:
Essays on Poetry and Criticism in which was an essay simply called
“Dante.” In this essay Eliot
praises the work of Dante, a “philosophical poet” placing him on par with
Shakespeare.
In “The Hollow Men” one sees obvious allusions to Acheron, the river
that marks the entrance in to Hell proper (see diagram on left) the most
frequently cited reference is from section four:
“In
this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river”
The mention of the
“tumid river” is from the third canto of Dante’s Inferno.
Similarly, the opening reference to Kurtz, from Joseph Conrad’s Heart
of Darkness, conjures ideas of a river journey and this juxtaposed with the line
“a penny for the Old Guy” makes an
obvious connection to Cheron, Hell’s Ferryman, who you can see herding the
souls into Hell in the image below
"The
communication / Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language
of the living."
Click
here to hear Dennis
Hopper and others read/recite sections of
“The Hollow Men” from the film Apocalypse Now.
page created by Ryan Ourada, editing by LG.