Title: Eliot claimed to have made up the
title, "The Hollow Men" from combining "The Hollow Land",
the title of a romance by William Morris with Kipling's title, "The Broken
Men". Many scholars believe this to be one of Ol' Possum's many
false trails, instead believing it comes from a mention of 'hollow men'
in Julius Caesar or any of several references to Joseph Conrad's Kurtz
as hollow in some way (a 'hollow sham', 'hollow at the core'). The title
immediately presents us with the first of many allusions, directly referencing
two of the four main sources for this poem, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar,
and Conrad's Heart of
Darkness The other sources are the Gunpowder
Plot and The Divine
Comedy, both of which also deal with men or shadows of men who
may be described as hollow at the core.
The Gunpowder Plot: This conspiracy arose
from the English Catholics' resentment of King James I and his reign's
treatment of their religion. A group of extremists led by Rober Catesby
planed to seize power by killing King James I and his ministers at the State
Opening of Parliament (November 5, 1605), leaving England without a government.
Francis Tresham, one of the conspirators, gave the plan away when he wrote to
his brother-in-law, Lord Monteagle, telling him to stay away from the Houses of
Parliament during the Opening. Monteagle informed the Lord Chancellor of
the warning, who in turn told the king. On November 4, 1605, Guy Fawkes
was arrested in the cellars of the House of Lords, standing guard over two tons
of gunpowder. He was tortured until he revealed the names of his
co-conspirators, who, if they hadn't yet fled the country, were soon executed.
Now the British celebrate November 5 with bonfires, fireworks, and by burning
effigies of Guy. Theoretically, they are celebrating the execution of a
traitor, though some have been been known to see it as a celebration of the
near death of the monarchy.
Julius Caesar: Shakespeare's version of the story of Julius Caesar
also centers around a violent conspiracy of men who are blinded by their cause.
In it, Brutus, a leading Roman citizen, is approached by Cassius, who is
recruiting people to conspire to assassinate Caesar. Cassius is motivated
by ambition, envy, and malice, and he persuades Brutus that Caesar is a tyrant
who will destroy the Roman
Republic. Cassius
plays on Brutus's vanity of his fame as champion for the public good, blinding
Brutus to the evil nature of the conspiracy.
The Divine Comedy: Dante Alighieri's classic allegorical story in
which, Dante himself becomes a pilgrim traveling through the three kingdoms of
the afterlife: hell (The Inferno), purgatory (Purgatorio), and
heaven (Paradiso). He is lead through the first two by the poet
Virgil in a pilgrimage orchestrated by his late love Beatrice in an attempt to
redeem his soul and convince him to change his life so that after seeing
Beatrice in heaven he will desire to join her there again after his own death.
Heart of
Darkness: Next to Dante's
writing, this story by Joseph Conrad is commonly held to be most important and
influential literary experience in Eliot's poetry. It is a story full of
hollow men- men empty of faith, personality, moral strength, and even
humanity. In it the character Marlow tells of his own journey into the
heart of Africa, a dark world populated by
morally empty men living only for ivory and the money and power that it
brings. Deep in the interior, he meets Kurtz, the most depraved man of
them all, yet one who, on his deathbed, seems to realize the true horror of
what he and humanity as he knows it is and does.
1925: Eliot wrote
this poem during a period of absence from the bank, having just suffered a
nervous breakdown. The theme of 'hollowness' presented in the poem
directly relates to his own psychological condition at the time, a condition
known at the time as 'aboulie'.
epigraph to
section: The words spoken by a servant to announce Kurtz's death. They
signal the end of an evil presence, but also the end of one who was formerly a
great man. With his death the values he held during life also die,
leaving the survivors without anything to guide them.
epigraph to poem:
A version of 'A penny for the Guy?', the cry children take up when begging
money to buy fireworks with on Guy Fawkes Day.
ll.1-4: The 'hollow men'
and 'stuffed men', 'filled with straw' are a combination of the effigies burned
on Guy Fawkes Day, the conspirators in Julius Caesar, and Kurtz.
More profoundly, they are Eliot's modern man, an empty, corrupt breed.
l. 2: According to Valerie
Eliot, the marionette in Stravinsky's Petrouchka.
l. 4: Straw is the usual
filling for the effigies burned on Guy Fawkes Day. It
is also a common building material for effigies used in harvest or fertility
rituals celebrating the symbolic death of a vegetation god as necessary for the
rebirth and growth of the land. One of these, observed by both Sir James
Frazer and W. Warde
Fowler is the Roman ritual of the Argei. This imagery suggests
that a sacrifice of the 'hollow men' can redeem mankind and that after their
destruction we can again flourish.
Eliot examined a similar myth, that of the
Fisher King, extensively in The Waste
Land. The Fisher King myth has many variations, but
generally includes an ailing king whose kingdom is sterile- nothing will grow,
and the people suffer. The king and the land can only be cured by a pure
quest for some sort of knowledge (sometimes in the form of an object, sometimes
in a question that must be asked). It is also frequently associated with
the Arthurian quest for the Holy Grail and the knight Perceval. Ususally,
with the success of the quest, the king and the land are healed. Sometimes
the king must die and be succeeded before the land can again bloom. The
theme of a king or god needing to die, at least symbolically, for the land to
become fertile (for spring to come) also occurs in the Summerian myth of Inanna
and Demuzi, the rituals surrounding the Egyptian god Osris, and the Greek myth
of Persephone and Demeter.
l. 6: Whispers act as an
instrument of fate throughout HoD.
Marlow recounts how the wilderness "had whispered to [Kurtz] things about
himself which he did not know ... and the whisper proved irresistibly
fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the
core". And while Marlow attempts and fails to summon up the courage to
tell Kurtz's Intended the truth about Kurtz's last words, those words are
whispered in his mind, signifying his own hollowness and cowardice.
Besides symbolizing fate, whispers can also signify conspiracy, a theme present
throughout this poem and seemingly inherent in the hollow men.
ll. 11-12: This
refers to a condition of unfulfillment as seen in the spiritual state of the
shades in Inferno iii.
These shades never made a choice regarding their spiritual state during life
(neither following nor rebelling against God) instead living solely for
themselves. Neither heaven nor hell will let them past its gates. A
similar condition exists, in HoD, among the men of the Eldorado
Exploring Expedition: they lacked the moral strength and courage to back up
their greed. A third explanation of the lines is Marlow's own experience
with and resistance of death. Here we see that the same description that
applies to the hollow men can also be applied to what is experienced by those
who attempt to struggle against that empty way of life and death.
ll. 13-15: Those
who have crossed to death's other kingdom are those who have left behind a
state of spiritual nothingness (or, alternatively, hell or purgatory) and
entered into knowledge and recognition of that state ( or heaven). They
are the ones who are capable of looking directly at life and the universe and
seeing the inner truth. Kurtz, though probably not heaven bound, had the same
moment of realization just before his death, as seen in his stare and his final
utterance, "The horror! The horror!" The idea of crossing
refers to a transition from one state to the other, such as when Dante the
Pilgrim had to cross to rivers to be freed from sin and shame before his eyes
could stand to look upon his beloved Beatrice in heaven. This is a plea
from the hollow men to those who have escaped their fate. Like the
numerous souls who beg Dante to keep their memory alive, they are asking for
those lucky souls to remember the fate of those less fortunate, and to also
remember that they were not seeking to do wrong, but simply lacked what the
lucky ones have, morals and values.
l. 15: The song sung by
children begging for pennies on Guy Fawkes Day begins
"Please to remember / The fifth of November / Gunpowder, treason, and
plot."
l. 19: Beatrice tells
Dante how she came to him first in dreams to lead him back to the part of virtue.
Just as Beatrice give Dante a chance for redemption by orchestrating his
journey, all men also have the chance for redemption.
ll. 19-22:
Dante cannot meet Beatrice's eyes when he first sees her because he still feels
shame and suffers their reprove. He acts like a disobedient child unable
to meet a stern parent's gaze until he is purified by the waters of the River
Lethe. Marlow encounters the force of eyes and glances throughout his
adventures, ranging from the invisible eyes of the forest, to Kurtz's dying
gaze, to the "guileless, profound, confident, and trustful" gaze of
Kurtz's intended. The hollow men should be shamed by the eyes of the
virtuous, but at the same time those eyes contain within them a chance for
redemption. This is an opportunity Dante the pilgrim accepted and Marlow
refused.
ll. 20-22: In
heaven, Dante no longer feels shamed by Beatrice's gaze, but instead, marvels
in her beauty, which continues to grow as they advance to the uppermost strata
of heaven. Once the invitation for redemption is accepted and virtue is
restored, the formerly hollow man has no reason to feel shame when looking into
the eyes of the virtuous. "Death's dream kingdom" is heaven; in
order to have reached that paradise, even if by means of a guide, the soul must
already have been purified. He does not see the same shame causing eyes
he saw originally, instead he sees a gaze that he can meet.
ll. 23-28:
These lines resemble the Dante's description of the Earthly Paradise, when
still seen from afar in Cantos xxvii-xxix. Dante used the star as
a symbol representing God or Mary.
l. 23: A broken
column is a traditional graveyard memorial for a premature death.
l. 24: A book Eliot
reviewed in 1923, The Sacred Dance by W.O.E. Oesterley contains the
image of a 'savage' who is awestruck by 'a tree, swayed by wind, moved'.
l. 32: In the section
"The Propitiation of Vermin by Farmers" in The Golden Bough Frazer discusses both
the dressing in animal skins for ritualistic purposes, as well as the custom of
hanging up the corpse of a member of a crop damaging species as a possible
origin of the scarecrow. Weston looks at the staves of Morris Dancers, clowns
in a costume of animal skins or a cap of skin. She sees them as a
surviving remnant of earlier vegetation ceremonies. Where the previous
stanza showed the beauty present in paradise and the hope a tormented soul has
of reaching that place, this one and the next show that souls fear in the obstacles
that will have to overcome before that can happen.
l. 33: In The Waste
Land Eliot associates the "man with three staves" a
card in the Tarot with the Fisher King
l. 35: In the Inferno
spirits are blown about by the wind and in HoD
the native dies just because he left the shutter open, "He had no
restraint- just like Kurtz- a tree swayed in the wind."
ll. 37-38:
Both Dante the Pilgrim and Marlow must face a meeting they greatly fear.
Dante must meet Beatrice and face her divine beauty. In doing so he can't
help but be reminded of all of his own sins and failings, but by crossing the
River Lethe, which flows in shadow, he can be purified and look upon her.
At this point, he has completed the unpleasant stages of his journey, which is
really an attempt to save his own soul, so that after his own death he will be
able to join her in heaven. Marlow also faces the crux of his journey
when he faces Kurtz's fiancé, but he chooses a darker path. He follows
through on his word to Kurtz by giving her his letters, but he can not bring
himself to tell the truth about his last words. In his submission to the
heart of darkness he faces a moral twilight in which he chooses the shadow,
literally, as the sun sets. The twilight that sets in is the choice the
soul must face between light and darkness.
ll. 39-44:
These lines are thought to be material originally discarded from The Waste Land as they
closely resemble lines from sections I and V both in language and
imagery. The stone images (and 'broken stone' in l. 51) suggests
idolatrous worship. "The worship of stones is a degradation of a
higher form of worship," F.B. Jevens's An Introduction to the History
of Religions, a 1896 text Eliot is known to have studied at Harvard. The desert
imagery suggests sterility, probably the sterility of the modern world.
l. 47: HoD:
"We live, as we dream - alone."
ll. 49-51: To
the end, Kurtz's Intended is confident in his faithfulness, goodness, and
unending love for her, while in reality he has turned to the worship of pagan
forces (stone is symbolic of idolatrous and thus, non-Christian worship).
ll. 50-51: A
perversion of Juliet's line about "lips that they must use in prayer"
instead of for kissing. Kurtz's lips are being used in pagan worship
instead of to express love for his Intended. Also, from Psalm 57, as used
in Purgatorio
xxii, xxxiii, "Lord, open thou my lips; and my mouth shall
show forth thy praise!"
ll. 52-56: The
valley Marlow walks through upon his arrival to the Congo, half excavated,
littered with abandoned objects, and hopeless native laborers, "it seemed
to me I had stepped into the gloomy circle of some Inferno ... Black shapes
crouched, lay sat between the trees, leaning against the trunks, clinging to
the earth, half coming out, half effaced with in the dim light, in all the
attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair." Like ll. 39-44,
a representation of the sterile, modern world, a place where the eyes that
offer hope and shame don't exist.
l. 56: Possibly the
"new jaw bone of an ass" (Judges xv, 15-19) with which Samson slew a
thousand Philistines. This would seem to signify that the civilizing
factor has broken, contributing to, or allowing, modern man's decline. The Golden Bough offers an
anthropological explanation; the Baganda (and African tribe) believe that the
spirit of the dead clings to the jawbone. The jaw bone of their deceased
king is made into an effigy and put in a temple. Again, since the bone is
broken, any leadership that could have taken from the talisman is no longer
available.
ll. 57-60: These
lines allude to all four major sources: the last meeting places and tumid
rivers encountered by the Pilgrim on his journey, the element of conspiracy
(last meetings before the treasonous act) in Julius Caesar
and of the Gunpowder
Plot, and Marlow's experiences with the secretive trading company,
"It was just as though I had been let into some conspiracy." At
the trading station he finds that most of the white employees occupy themselves
"by backbiting and intriguing against each other in a foolish kind of
way. There was an air of plotting about the station, but nothing came of
it, of course it was as unreal as everything else." This is the
final meeting of a doomed conspiracy, the meeting of the lost, hollow souls
before they sentenced to the inferno.
l. 60: Dante's River
Acheron flowing around hell or the river Marlow follows into the African 'heart
of darkness'.
ll. 61-62: If
the eyes reappear, so does hope and the possibility for salvation. At
Dante the Pilgrim's first meeting with Beatrice, her eyes were shameful for him
to look upon, yet they also signaled the possibility of his redemption.
When he is able to look upon her again it signifies a change in the state of
his soul, it has been purified. When Marlow meets Kurtz's Intended, he is
looked upon by the eyes of a pure spirit, "The room seemed to have drown
darker, as if all the sad light of the cloudy evening had taken refuge on her
forehead. This fair hair, this pale visage, this pure brow, seemed surrounded
by an ashy halo from which dark eyes looked out at me. Their glance was
guileless, profound, and trustful." That moment Marlow's chance to
resist the darkness which has penetrated modern life.
ll. 63-64: In
Paradiso xxx
the Pilgrim's vision of the highest level of heaven is of a rose whose petals
are formed by Mary and the saints. In Paradiso xxxi
he refers to God as the 'single star', and in Paradiso
xxxii and elsewhere he refers to Mary as a rose.
l. 65: The twilight
refers to Marlow's meeting with Kurtz's Intended, to the twilight that is
physically gathering, and to the hopelessness in Marlow's own soul.
Twilight represents a choice, but it can also be the mere memory of that
choice.
ll. 68-71:
These lines parody a children's song that is derived from a fertility
dance done around a mulberry bush 'on a cold and frosty morning'. A
prickly pear is a desert cactus, continuing the desert imagery that is
particularly prevalent at the beginning of the third section of the poem.
5:00am is the traditional time of Christ's resurrection. In a 1923 review
Eliot quoted Frazer on "how often with the decay of old faiths the serious
rites and pageants .. [primitive, religious dances] have degenerated into the
sports of children." Here he has further perverted the children's song by
turning it into a modern infertility dance. By performing an infertility
dance at the moment of resurrection, we are in effect blocking and rejecting
the salvation it can bring.
ll. 72-90: Taken
almost directly from Julius Caesar II.i:
BRUTUS
Between the acting of a
dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interm is
Like a phantasma, or hideous dream:
The genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council; and the state of men,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection.
Another possible source is
the line "Between the void and its pure issue" from Valéry's The
Cemetery by the Sea. In 1924, Eliot wrote an introduction to Valéry's
Le Serpent in which he compared that line to Brutus's lines. He
viewed The Cemetery by the Sea as an expression of Valery's melancholy
skepticism attributed to "the agony of creation ... the mind constantly
mocks and dissuades, and urges the creative activity in vain." The three
central stanzas of this section closely resemble Valery's in their phrasal
structure and emphatic rhythm and also in their thematic contrast between 'idea'
and 'reality'.
This section of the poem deals with the true
cause of hollowness- failing to make that choice that was once offered, failing
to take action, giving in and living only as a shadow. The shadow has had
a chance to recognize the difference between salvation and damnation and has
either rejected that chance or failed to choose between the two.
l. 76: In 1935 Eliot
accepted a suggestion that he had taken the 'Shadow' from "Non sum qualis
eram" (I am not now as once I was) Ernest Dowson's most famous poem.
It contains the phrases "Then fell thy shadow" and "Then falls
the shadow." He is quoted as responding, "This derivation had not
occurred in my mind, but I believe it to be correct, because the lines... have
always run in my head." HoD
also features shadows throughout: the boat moves in shadow, men die with
shadows across their faces, pain is experienced in shadow, Kurtz's secrets are
metaphorical shadows, Kurtz himself is a "Shadow - that wandering and
tormented thing," and at the end of the story a shadow stretches across
the sky, a shadow over all of mankind.
l. 77: Part of the
Lord's Prayer, as originally mentioned in I Chronicles xxix.
l. 83: Like l. 77 and l.
91, this line is italicized, suggesting a quotation. In this case it
is from Conrad's An Outcast of the Islands, in which a broken man is
punished by being kept alive rather than by being killed.
ll. 86-87:
From Aristotelian philosophy, "matter only has potency until form gives it
existence".
ll. 88-89:
From Platonic philosophy, "the essence is the inapprehensible ideal, which
finds material expression in its descent to the lower, material plane of
reality."
ll. 95-98:
Here, Eliot is again parodying the children's song 'Here we go round the
mulberry bush,' specifically the line "this is the way we clap our
hands". He's also referring to the biblical idea of a world without
end from, "Glory be to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost, as
it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.
Amen"
l. 98: George
Santayana lectured at Harvard while Eliot was a student there. His
account of the Divine Comedy included: "it all ends, not with a bang, not
with some casual incident, but in sustained reflection." The whimper
could be in reference to two things: the Kipling poem, "Danny
Deever", with which Eliot is known to have been familier and
Dante's description of a newborn baby's cry upon leaving one world to enter
another. That in turns suggests the image of a repentant Dante standing
before Beatrice as a child before as stern parent.
The whimper is that Guy Fawkes exhaled when
he gave up his co-conspirators, it is what Brutus and Cassius spoke when their
plans to rule crumbled, it is Kurtz's last utterance when he finally realizes
the truth of the world he lives in, and it is the end for all hollow men.
Comments
Post a Comment