The Hollow Men by TS Eliot is a work that is referenced throughout pop culture, from films (Apocalypse Now) to video games (Halo) to television (X-Files) and in literature (The Stand). There are probably a dozen other examples that can take the place of those above, but those were the first ones I came up with.

I came to read Eliot relatively late in college; I was a business major and spent my days studying boring subjects such as statistics, finance, marketing, and economics while my English major friends had all the fun with poetic criticism. I can’t actually remember who introduced me, but I do remember that I was both fascinated and worried by him. Fascinated because each poem seemed to be a scavenger hunt of references that, due to the OCD nature of my personality, I would be forced to track down. Worried because I had this deep-seated fear that I wasn’t going to be able to fully comprehend Eliot and that maybe he was a bit too complex for me. All these years later it’s still pretty much the same. I still enjoy reading his work and tracking down references, and I still have the feeling that I’m missing something.

Even though we’ve covered TS Eliot in the emailed version of this effort, he’s yet to appear on the website. Part of that is length - most of the Eliot poems one would like to share tend to be fairly long, but the other part is it’s hard to pick one poem and neglect the others. As usually happens, this poem came up recently in an email about (of all things) the scientific leanings of certain GOP presidential candidates. The line paraphrased in the email was “this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a yee-haw”. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine who the subject of the email was.

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.