Individuality Sunken Into Oblivion: The Hollow Men, by T. S. Eliot

A title is the first impression a reader receives from a work of literature, somewhat like a summary of the overall meaning of the text. The Hollow Men, a poem by T. S. Eliot, possesses a title that conveys a vast amount of meaning and mystery. Like The Wasteland, The Hollow Men transmits a message of emptiness and vacancy. It makes the reader think about a barren and void humanity, an existence that has no meaning or purpose whatsoever. The fist stanza of the poem emphasizes the significance of the title by mentioning how mankind has succumbed to a state where free will or the ability to construct one’s own thoughts is inexistent.
“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” (lines 1-10).
The words “hollow”, “dried voices”, “quiet”, and “meaningless” illustrate human insignificance, or our lack of strength and mental capacity to formulate our own thoughts and ideas. As the poem indicates, our brains, filled with straw, have become useless. Even though mankind makes an effort to unite and act collectively, our quiet whispers are incapable of advocating any change. Our voices, soft as the “wind in dry grass” (line 8), are so miserable and insignificant that they still remain unheard and barren as our hollow minds.
“Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;” (lines 11-12).
As this oxymoron shows, mankind is existent and tangible, like shapes and shades, but lacks the meaning and spark that makes each one of us unique and distinct, such as forms and colors. We live our lives as machines that perform every function necessary to go on living, but do not have the free will necessary to make us different from others. We are indifferent to our personality, and our minds are hollow and meaningless. We prefer to exist as ordinary beings instead of extraordinary individuals.

“And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.” (lines 25-28).
In this stanza, Eliot emphasizes the fact that man’s actions are hollow and insignificant by using the words “distant” and “fading”. Our uniqueness is fading away, becoming more distant every time as our lives loose meaning, purpose, and importance. Eliot portrays us as dead men in a dead man’s land, as individuals who, as the book 1984 says, have lost their essence and uniqueness.
“This is the dead land
This is the cactus land …
The supplication of a dead man’s hand” (lines 39-40, 43).

“The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley” (lines 52-55).
These four lines caught my attention not only because of the repetition of the word hollow, but also because of the metaphorical meaning of eyes. By talking about the absence of eyes, Eliot is referring to the lack of vision present in the world. We are unable to see, observe, or analyze our surroundings, and hence unable to formulate our own thoughts and interpretations of the world and what we see in it. The dying stars represent us, humans, and how their glow, or our individuality and uniqueness, are fading away and becoming a “hollow valley”.
“Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.” (lines 61-67).
Eliot proposes God, or the perpetual star that has always existed since the beginning of times, to be the only solution in order to reestablish human free will and individuality. Religion is “The hope only / Of empty men.” (lines 66-67), the only mechanism of abandoning a barren existence and living as people that have the ability to think in a unique manner.

The Hollow Men is written in free verse with no established meter. Eliot may have chosen this structure in order to symbolize the lack of order in the world; however, I disagree with the overall organization of the poem. I believe that an established rhyme scheme and meter would have structured the poem in such a way as to symbolize the existence of the hollow humanity and how, by behaving like machines, we forget to live as unique, separate individuals with a distinct, free, and un-empty mind. I also wonder why Eliot decided to make an allusion to the children’s song “The Mulberry Bush” at the beginning of the fifth section of the poem. What does this nursery rhyme signify? What exactly does the “prickly pear” represent?

The last couplet of the poem conveys as much meaning as the title.
“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.” (lines 97-98).
The end of the world and of the human race will not be caused by wars, violence, and disasters, as the Book of Revelations suggests, but by our emptiness and our incapability to think, act, or respond, as emphasized earlier on in the poem. We will see things crumble, but we will only lament and whimper as hollow men. Our voices, “quiet and meaningless” (line 7), will be unable to react and we will be forced to succumb to lamentation of the fate that awaits us. I believe that these last couple of lines are trying to advocate change in humans in order to transform our mentality of machines into one in which mankind will be able to react according to what our individual nature indicates, and thus turn away from the hollow existence we are living now.