The Hollow Men The stuffed men. by T. S. Eliot (1925) II Mistah Kurtz–he dead.1 Eyes I dare not meet in dreams In death’s dream kingdom 20 A penny for the old Guy2 These do not appear: There, the eyes are I Sunlight on a broken column We are the hollow men There, is a tree swinging We are the stuffed men And voices are 25 Leaning together In the wind’s singing Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! More distant and more solemn Our dried voices, when 5 Than a fading star.

We whisper together Let me be no nearer Are quiet and meaningless In death’s dream kingdom 30 As wind in dry grass Let me also wear Or rats’ feet over broken glass Such deliberate disguises In our dry cellar 10 Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves In a field Shape without form, shade without colour, Behaving as the wind behaves 35 Paralysed force, gesture without motion; No nearer–

Those who have crossed Not that final meeting With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom In the twilight kingdom Remember us–if at all–not as lost 15 Violent souls, but only III As the hollow men This is the dead land This is cactus land 40 Here the stone images 1 Quotation from Heart of Darkness, a story by the English writer Joseph Conrad (1857-1924). Kurtz went into the African jungle as an official of a trading Are raised, here they receive company, and there degenerated into an evil, tyrannical man. His dying words The supplication of a dead man’s hand were “the horror!” Under the twinkle of a fading star. 2 Guy Fawkes was one of a group of conspirators who planned to blow up the English House of Commons in 1605; he was caught and executed before the plan was carried out, and the day of his execution (November 5) is celebrated in Is it like this 45 England in a way similar to Halloween in the United States. Children make In death’s other kingdom straw effigies of the “guy” and beg for pennies for fireworks. Waking alone Between the idea And the reality At the hour when we are Between the motion Trembling with tenderness And the act 75 Lips that would kiss 50 Falls the Shadow Form prayers to broken stone. For Thine is the Kingdom5

IV Between the conception The eyes are not here And the creation There are no eyes here Between the emotion 80 In this valley of dying stars And the response In this hollow valley 55 Falls the Shadow This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms Life is very long

In this last of meeting places Between the desire We grope together And the spasm 85 And avoid speech Between the potency Gathered on this beach of the tumid river 60 And the existence Between the essence Sightless, unless And the descent The eyes reappear Falls the Shadow 90 As the perpetual star For Thine is the Kingdom Multifoliate rose3 Of death’s twilight kingdom 65 The home only For Thine is Of empty men. Life is For Thine is the V Here we go round the prickly pear This is the way the world ends 95 Prickly pear prickly pear This is the way the world ends Here we go round the prickly pear 70 This is the way the world ends At five o’clock in the morning.4 Not with a bang but a whimper.

3 Part III of the great medieval poem The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighiere 4 Sardonic allusion to a children’s rhyming game, “here we go round the (1265-1321) is a vision of Paradise. The souls of the saved in heaven range mulberry bush.” Substituting a prickly pear cactus for the mulberry bush, Eliot themselves around the Deity in the figure of a “multifoliate rose” (Paradiso, meshes this image with others of the modern world as a “cactus land.” xxviii.30). 5 Part of a line from the Lord’s Prayer.