Poet, dramatist, and critic Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965) was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. He moved to England when he was twenty-five and eventually became a British subject. He once said that his poetry was a combination of American and British influences but that “in its sources, in its emotional springs, it comes from America.” Eliot studied philosophy at Harvard and Oxford, even learning Sanskrit to study Buddhism and other Indic religions. He later worked at Lloyds Bank in London and eventually became a director of Faber & Faber, an English publishing house. His most famous works include “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1917), The Waste Land (1922), “Ash Wednesday” (1930), “Burnt Norton” (1941), “Little Gidding” (1942), The Four Quartets (1943), and the play Murder in the Cathedral (1935). The musical Cats was based on Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939), which earned him posthumous Tony Awards in 1983 for best book and best score. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. Eliot is considered one of the great poetic innovators of the twentieth century and is closely associated with the modernist movement—especially with regard to his use of stream of consciousness.
The Hollow Men
Published in 1925 in Eliot’s Poems: 1909–1925, some people consider “The Hollow Men” an addendum to Eliot’s famous poem The Waste Land (1922). Four of the five sections of “The Hollow Men” had been previously published in literary journals, such as the Dial.
Mistah Kurtz—he dead.1
A penny for the Old Guy2
I
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
5
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
10
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
15
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
20
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
25
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.
Let me be no nearer
30
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
35
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—
Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom
III
This is the dead land
40
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.
45
Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
50
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
55
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
60
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
65
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.
V
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
70
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
75
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
80
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
85
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
90
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
95
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.
(1925)