The Darkness Surrounding T.S. Eliot's Poem, "The Hollow Men."

After reading T. S. Eliot’s poem, “The Hollow Men,” you will quickly realize that it is not a happy poem. “The Hollow Men,” is a dark poem that speaks of men that are “hollow,” or “stuffed.” I decided to go deeper into the darkness of the poem and the results were very interesting.

In the epigraph of the poem (The references between the Title and the first line of the poem) I researched where the line, “Mistah Kurtz—he dead,” came from. It came from a book ironically called, “The Heart of Darkness,” by Joseph Conrad. Mr. Kurtz in the story is a character that goes into the heart of Africa seeking riches and ivory and he killed many people that tried to stand in his way. In the story, it describes Kurtz killing natives by chopping off their heads and putting them on sticks to serve as a scare tactic to anyone who tried to rise up against him. Now if that isn’t dark and hollow I don’t know what is.

The story follows the main character, Charles Marlow, who is a Belgian native who takes a job as a river-boat captain in Africa from a Belgian trading company. Along Charles’ journey to Congo he encounters three levels of darkness: the darkness of the Congo wilderness, the darkness of the Belgians' cruel treatment of the natives, and the unfathomable darkness within every human being for committing heinous acts of evil. I believe the last level of darkness is what T. S. Eliot was trying to describe when he was writing “The Hollow Men.”

Here is the full context of the T. S. Eliot’s reference in the epigraph as it was written in the book, “The Heart of Darkness,”

The brown current ran swiftly out of the heart of darkness, bearing us down towards the sea with twice the speed of our upward progress; and Kurtz’s life was running swiftly, too, ebbing, ebbing out of his heart into the sea of inexorable time. The manager was very placid, he had no vital anxieties now, he took us both in with a comprehensive and satisfied glance: the ‘affair’ had come off as well as could be wished. ... The pilgrims looked upon me with disfavour. I was, so to speak, numbered with the dead. It is strange how I accepted this unforeseen partnership, this choice of nightmares forced upon me in the tenebrous land invaded by these mean and greedy phantoms. ...

Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. ... It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw in that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror – of an intense and hopeless despair. ... He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision – he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath –

‘The horror! The horror!’

I blew the candle out and left the cabin. The pilgrims were dining in the mess-room, and I took my place opposite the manager, who lifted his eyes to give me a questioning glance, which I successfully ignored. ... Suddenly the manager’s boy put his insolent black head in the doorway, and said in a tone of scathing contempt –"Mistah Kurtz – he dead."

This passage is a fairly well known passage. The line that stood out to me in reference to Eliot’s poem was, “I saw in that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror—of an intense and hopeless despair...he cried in a whisper...” Eliot makes a direct reference to this “whisper” in the first stanza of “The Hollow Men,” “Our dried voices, when we whisper together are quiet and meaningless as winds in dry grass or rats’ feet over broken glass in our dry cellar.” Eliot’s dark imagery has a sort of surreal feeling to it. I found myself drawn in to the mysterious darkness that this poem describes.

The second reference that Eliot makes is regarding the line, “a penny for the old guy,” which is a reference to Guy Fawkes who tried to assassinate King James I by blowing up the House of Lords with explosives and gunpowder during the state opening of England’s Parliament on November 5^th, 1605. Fawkes was found out before he could carry out the plan and was sentenced to death by execution.

Fawkes jumped from the scaffold where he was to be hanged and broke his neck, thus avoiding the agony of the drawing and quartering (chopping your body into pieces) that followed.Talk about “hollow.” Now people light bonfires and fireworks on Guy Fawkes Night in London to celebrate King James’ survival.

>I hope the references I made put what was dark into the light. T. S. Eliot’s poem, “The Hollow Men,” serves as a harsh reminder to how cold and dark the world can be. Men can be cruel, empty people. T. S. Eliot’s poem proves it.