Hollow Men

ByT. S Eliot

Submitted to: MS SanaSubmitted by: Sajida

Subject: Translation StudiesM.Phil Applied Linguistics, UOL.

T. S Eliot• Thomas Stearns Eliot (1925) was a British,

American-born essayist, publisher, playwright, literary and social critic, and "one of the twentieth century's major poets.“He immigrated to England in 1914 at age 25, settling, working and marrying there.

• He is the Nobel-Prize- winning modernist poet.

• Eliot attracted widespread attention for his poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915), which is seen as a masterpiece of the Modernist movement.

T.S Eliot• . It was followed by some of the best-known

poems in the English language, including The Waste Land (1922), The Hollow Men (1925), Ash Wednesday (1930), and Four Quartets (1945).[3] He is also known for his seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral (1935).

• He died of emphysema at his home in Kensington in London, on 4 January 1965, and was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium. In accordance with his wishes, his ashes were taken to St Michael and All Angels' Church, East Coker, America. A wall plaque commemorates him with a quotation from his poem "East Coker", "In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning."

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• In 1967, on the second anniversary of his death, Eliot was commemorated by the installation of stone, is inscribed with a quotation from his poem "Little Gidding", "the communication / of the dead is tongued with fire beyond / the language of the living.”

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Hollow Men

• The Hollow Men • by T. S. Eliot• Written 1925• Country England• Language English• Lines98• American Poet

Hollow Men• Introduction• Title• Epigraph• Motifs• Poem• Paraphrasing• Analysis• Allusion• Literary devices• Symbolism and imagery• Music and Singing• Form and meter• Style(monologue)

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• Sound Check• Setting• Passivity• Dreams and Hope• Language Shift• Tone• Culture Shock• Linguistics codes

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Next• The Hollow Men appeared in 1925.• For the critic Edmund Wilson, it marked "The

nadir of the phase of despair and desolation given such effective expression in The Waste Land.

• It is Eliot's major poem of the late 1920s. Similar to Eliot's other works especially, Waste Land. Which is macro level picture of moral decline and it is a micro level picture of moral decline.

• Its themes are overlapping and fragmentary. Post-war Europe under the Treaty of Versailles (which Eliot despised), the difficulty of hope and religious conversion, Eliot's failed marriage.

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Hollow Men

• Suggestive title: Poet is talking about 'empty’ or ‘shallow men’ or ‘stuffed men’.

• Epigraph:The two epigraphs to the poem, "Mistah Kurtz – he dead" and "A penny for the Old Guy", are allusions to Conrad's character and to Guy Fawkes, attempted arsonist of the English house of Parliament, and his straw-man effigy that is burned each year in the United Kingdom on Guy Fawkes Night.

Motifs1. The Damaged Psyche of Humanitya. Like many modernist writers, Eliot wanted his

poetry to express the fragile psychological state of humanity in the twentieth century. The passing of Victorian ideals and the trauma of World War.

b. Eliot saw society as paralyzed and wounded, and he imagined that culture was crumbling and dissolving.

2. The Power of Literary Historya. Eliot maintained great reverence for myth and the

Western literary canon, and he packed his work full of allusions, quotations, footnotes, and scholarly exegeses.Back

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• The Waste Land juxtaposes fragments of various elements of literary and mythic traditions with scenes and sounds from modern life. The effect of this poetic collage is both a reinterpretation of canonical texts and a historical context for his examination of society and humanity.

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Motifs3. The Changing Nature of Gender Roles• Over the course of Eliot’s life, gender roles and

sexuality became increasingly flexible, and Eliot reflected those changes in his work. In the repressive Victorian era of the nineteenth century, women were confined to the domestic sphere, sexuality was not discussed or publicly explored.

• Women were allowed to attend school, and women who could afford it continued their education at those universities that began accepting women in the early twentieth century.

Fragmentation• Eliot used fragmentation in his poetry both

to demonstrate the chaotic state of modern existence and to juxtapose literary texts against one another. In Eliot’s view, humanity’s psyche had been shattered by World War I and by the collapse of the British Empire.

• He himself says, “These fragments I have shored against my ruins”.

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Mythic and Religious Ritual

• Eliot’s tremendous knowledge of myth, religious ritual, academic works, and key books in the literary tradition informs every aspect of his poetry. He filled his poems with references to both the obscure and the well known, thereby teaching his readers as he writes i.e. Charon from Greek Mythology and get one coin as fare, Divine Comedy of Virgil, etc.

Infertility• Starting lines of the poem reveals that the

speaker’s mind to become infertile and his head has been filled with straw. He is now unable to think properly, to perceive accurately, or to conceive of images or thoughts. 'We are the hollow men / We are the stuffed men.'

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Paraphrasing“We are the hollow men……Shape without form- shade without colour,Paralysed force, gesture without motion”

• A shape becomes a form when it has substance. Otherwise it's just an empty idea, like the difference between the ball you imagine in your head (a shape) and a ball of dough (a form).

• In the same line of thought, you can't have a "shade" without "color," because "shade" is a degree of color. But somehow, the Hollow Men have one without the other.

Lines 39-44

The Hollow Men pray to "stone images," which are like false gods or idols. The "dead man" is one of the Hollow Men. Because they do not have life, but they also cannot cross over into the kingdom of death.It's like being trapped at a rest stop on the highway between two destinations.To "supplicate" is to beg or ask for something, so they are begging the stones to help them out of their mess.Back

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Lines 52-56The Hollow Men are still worried about those eyes. The eyes from heaven are not present, but the lines also suggest that the Hollow Men have no vision.There is another way to interpret this line. "Eyes" sounds like "Is", as in, "The Is are not here." There are no independent personalities or selves among the group.Hope continues to fade, as the stars fade or "die" away.At any rate, here the only true kingdom is the Kingdom of God, and they had their chance to join it but did not.

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Their only hope is if the heavenly eyes come back as a star.This star would be "perpetual" or eternal, unlike the "fading" or "dying" stars in the desert. By now you've probably noticed that Eliot is throwing around symbols like candy at a Fourth of July parade.The point of these lines is that the Hollow Men cannot save themselves. They have no hope except for the Heavenly souls to come down and restore their vision of truth and goodness.

Lines 61-67

Lines 68-71And if you didn't have a mulberry bush, well, then you'd just have to sing about the "prickly pear" cactus."Here we go 'round the mulberry bush" is a children's song about people dancing around the bush "so early in the morning."Eliot actually gives the time at which they are dancing: 5 o'clock in the morning.According to one commentary on the poem, "5:00 a.m. is the traditional time of Christ's resurrection" (source).The resurrection is the most important moment in the Christ story, but here the Hollow Men are performing a children's dance around a cactus, totally unaware of the significance of the time.Back

Lines 78-83

Between the conceptionAnd the creationBetween the emotionAnd the response…….

Here comes that Shadow again. "Conception" is the moment of pregnancy or the beginning of idea, but "creation" is when that being comes into existence. An "emotion" is a mental state, but a response is an action resulting from that state.If you went to the doctor and he or she tapped your knee with that little rubber hammer, and you had no physical response, it’s a "Life is very long."Hollow Men sighing wearily as they say that, as if they are bored and worn down. Compared to eternity, of course, life is pretty short.Back

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Lines 92-94

For Thine is…….For Thine is the• The Hollow Men just trail off, as if they

can't remember how the rest goes or have slipped into some semi-conscious state. Cut them some slack, though their heads are filled with straw.

This is the way the world endsThis is the way the world endsThis is the way the world endsNot with a bang but a whimper.

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"This is the way we wash our clothes" and "This is the way we sweep the floor." They dance around the prickly pear.These lines are the most famous and frequently repeated lines in the poem.The world ends not with a "bang" like you might expect, with some huge war between angels and demons, but with a "whimper," like a defeated puppy.The question is, does the world end this way for everyone, or just for the Hollow Men? Thus the big thing always endup in a small gesture. Another truth is that death of lay men is not publically declared.

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AnalysisEpithet: Eliot ornaments his poem with

epithet from Latin Classical literature.Inversion: He also use inversion, first he

develop hope then he frustrates the reader.Binaries: Eliot uses several technique to highlight his

ideas through repetition, binaries, i.e. day and night, men and women, idea and reality.

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Allusions• This poem is very allusive, there are many allusions like where the

Hollow Men are gathered: on the banks of a swollen or "tumid" river. The river most likely represents Acheron, branch of the mythical River Styx in Greece that souls must cross into death .To make the trip, you would have to pay Charon, the ferryman, a coin to take you on his boat. Unfortunately, no one has arrived to take these souls across.

• There is an other allusion of Dante; Divine Comedy .They are stranded. There's nothing left to say about their dire situation, so they "avoid speech."In Canto 3 of Dante's Inferno, Dante asks his guide Virgil why souls are so eager to get across Acheron, and Virgil responds that God's justice "spurs them on" so that they actually want to get to Hell. But the Hollow Men can't even get to Hell.

• A penny for the Old Guy: The English celebrate Guy Fawkes Day every November 5th with fireworks and the burning of little straw men or "effigies.“

• The first epigraph is a quote from a servant in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

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Imagery• There are extensive use of auditory

imagery in this poem. The Hollow Men's description of their voice as being "As quiet and meaningless / As wind in dry grass" could apply to the sound of the poem as a whole, without the meaningless part. This poem is of...

• Whereas Eliot Picturesque style enable the reader to visualized the verses.

Visual imagery• the dream of death as life goes farther away.

The whispers of the hollow men emphasize the unimportance or insignificance of words within our lives, and in our deaths, for nothing can be said to change the process.

• Through the imagery formed by Eliot, both visual and auditory, the reader can be placed within the path of enlightenment. The first step to enlightenment is going through a desert land, which leaves a sense of infertility and suffering. The placement of only visual and auditory leaves the olfactory imagery out.Back

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Symbolism• Water: water symbolizes both life and

death. Although water has the regenerative possibility of restoring life and fertility, it can also lead to drowning and death.

• Music and Tone: Like most modernist writers, Eliot was interested in the divide between high and low culture, which he symbolized using music. He believed that high culture, including art, opera, and drama, was in decline. Eliot splices nursery rhymes with phrases from the Lord’s Prayer in “The Hollow Men,”

Symbol of Scarecow

Scarecrow• They wear ragged clothes and stand in a

field, supported by wooden poles or "crossed staves."Everything is dried and hollowed out, as in a war-stricken town or the scene of a terrorist attack. In line 25, their aimless behavior is compared using simile to the motions of the wind.

• Eyes:The Hollow Men are like that. They fear the judgmental glare of the people from "death's dream kingdom," but the eyes of...”

The Shadow

• "The Shadow" isn't just the name of a superhero movie starring Alec Baldwin, it's also the name of the mysterious symbol of darkness that disconnects causes from effects and completely messes with...

Heaven:The Hollow Men never speak of Heaven by name. In fact, they seem afraid to do so. They are curious about what "death's dream kingdom" is like, but they also fear the "eyes" of heavenly souls and th...

Dryness

The beginning of the poem establishes that the Hollow Men live in a dry and barren world. The presence of cacti confirms that the poem is set in a desert. Dryness is a symbol for lack of life.

Broken Things• Everything around the Hollow Men is

broken – nothing is complete. You wouldn't want to lend anything valuable to the Hollow Men or it would probably come back broken.

SettingThe Hollow Men live in a desert nether world that looks like it could be in outer space. Everything around them is bone dry. Everything, that is, except for the Acheron, a branch of the River Styx,...

Speaker:The poem is a dramatic monologue of sorts, which means that the speaker is not just a stand-in for the poet. Instead, Eliot puts words in the mouths of the Hollow Men and allows them to explain the...

PassivityThe Hollow Men have a bad case of ‘The

Shadow’. Like we sit down to do something and we blame shadow.

Language Shift Simple Language with description of common

things.

Tone• Pessimistic tone with confused mind.

Culture Shock• Society was morally declined. Owning to

war man power have lost their belief on heroism. Now valour was no more symbol of heroic essence. People rather to seek a positive way involve in purposeless activities.

StyleLike most modernist poetry, 'The Hollow Men' is written in free verse style, with many shifts in voice and point of view. Eliot was a fan of including abundant references to historical events and other literary works. It is recommended to read through the poem first to get an idea of the overall meaning. Only after this initial step should the reader then delve into the subtle references and 'world beyond the text' so characteristic of Eliot's style.

Form and Meter

• If you had to label the poem as anything, you would have to call it "free verse," because it doesn't have a regular meter or rhyme scheme.

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