By T. S. Eliot,
Written and Published in 1925
Poem
Meaning – 2 allusions
Mistah Kurtz –he dead.
A penny for the Old Guy.
 1) Kurtz in Heart of
Darkness – a spiritually
hollow man. Notice
diction – pidgin or
creole. As if a slave is
answering a question.
Slave is also passive and
humble; hollow in a
different way.
Poem
Meaning – 2 allusions
Mistah Kurtz –he dead.
A penny for the Old Guy.
 2) Guy Fawkes Day on
November 5th in England –
to commemorate his 1605
attempt at blowing up the
Parliament building,
children buy fireworks to
burn straw figures of him.
In this way he symbolizes
being physically hollow.
Secondary meaning –poor
old guy needs alms.
 Various interpretations have been issued:
 Post World War I – survivors of the Great War are left
hollow and remember the dead
 Possible religious commentary – a soul’s religious
journey from death through Heaven, Hell, and
Purgatory or Death’s Dream Kingdom, Death’s Twilight
Kingdom, and Death’s Other Kingdom
 Criticism of societal norms and civilization
 Even as a possible reaction to Eliot’s loss of his wife
through her betrayal
 Written approximately from 1890-1950 in the Modernist
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Literature style.
Moved away from the merely personal to an intellectual
statement about the world.
Much of this period was inspired by disillusionment and a
desire to get away from traditional and restrictive diction.
The speaker often wrestles with the fundamental question
of self.
See experimentation with genre and form – such as in T.S.
Eliot’s “The Waste Land” – which was considered the
predecessor to “Hollow Man,”
Esra Pound, E.E. Cummings, T.S. Eliot are a few examples
of Modernist poets
 Repetition – structural, synonyms, rhythmic (nursery
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rhymes), negation, binary opposition
Allusions – “Here We Go ‘Round the Mulberry Bush,” The
Lord’s Prayer, Julius Caesar, Dante
Symbolic imagery – bodies, eyes, voices, setting, time
Rhyme and rhythm – partial rhymes, not consistent.
Rhythm is uneven except for the stanzas at the end.
Vague deictic marks – these indicate the time, person, and
space taking part in a text. For example “We” in the poem
can refer to could refer to the speaker or a broader group of
people.
Enjambment(breaking of the syntactic unit at the end of
the line or between two verses) and stream of
consciousness
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.
 Starts with a contradition – we are
hollow and empty , yet at the same
time filled like scarecrows. How is
this? Our heads are filled with
absurdities causing our souls to
become empty and our lives futile.
 We lean together possibly in
submission or prayer without loud
and meaningful voices.
 Note the similies here – our voices
are like wind and rat’s feet, they are
ineffectual and meaningless, the
wind can’t dry the grass and the rats
are too small to get cut by the glass.
Our voices have been dried (by
whom? – is there a connotation
here?)
 Like corpses, we appear to be:
External shapes without structure,
shadows without vibrancy (paradox)
 We have no force or movement, only
stagnation (oxymoron, paralyzed force)
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Yet, we are remembered by those who
have crossed over to a parallel realm
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 nearerNot that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom.
This is the dead land,
This is the 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
Walking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness.
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.
The eyes are not here,
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars,
55 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.
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Allusion – gathered on the beach of the
tumid river - to Dante’s Inferno, waiting
at Limbo or the first circle of Hell, unable
to beg redemption from God.
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.
 A perverse twist on
the song “Here we go
‘round the mulberry
bush” it implies
further darkness to
this nursery rhyme.
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.
 Allusion to the Lord’s
Prayer
 The gunpowder plot
ended not with an
explosion, but with the
hanging and whimper of
Guy Fawkes. Another
allusion.