Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” has been one of my favorite poems since early in high school, and my love for it hasn’t diminished. I think I used to like it simply for the imagery and its sense of weight. I still admire those elements of the poem, but my eyes have learned to be a bit more critical.
I’ve been aware for years that the standard interpretation of the poem views it as a reaction to World War I, but I only recently looked at it myself to try and understand why. I was expecting to find little evidence for such an interpretation, but lo and behold, the critics have a good point (I mean, admit it: they can say some pretty erroneous stuff sometimes).
First are the repeated references to death’s other/dream/twilight kingdom: “Those who have crossed / with direct eyes to death’s other Kingdom” (ll. 13-14). Direct eyes? As opposed to indirect eyes, I suppose, which would imply seeing something in person rather than through description or imagination. This stanza, then, seems almost like a prayer for the dead to forgive the living.
Consistent images of emptiness also reinforce the notion that “The Hollow Men” is a depressed reflection on the pointlessness of war—this “great” war in particular. The most powerful of these is of course the scarecrow, which is at once both hollow and stuffed. Although it’d probably be a stretch to suggest what post-war Western society might be “stuffed” with, it’s more reasonable to assume that this hollowness is some kind of loss of humanity or moral integrity, covered up, perhaps by “deliberate disguises” (l. 32). The epigram from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness also seems to suggest this, for the novel is full of morally hollow men.
It’s the second stanza of III that really brings the image of a war-torn Europe home to me, though:
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.
What immediately comes to mind is a recently-widowed woman waking up in the middle of the night. She reaches over to the other side of the bed and finds it empty, so instead of being in the arms of her lover, all she can do is say a prayer at the war monument. That, of course, is just the eye of one beholder, and those lines could no doubt be seen in other lights.
Perhaps linked is the observation that in “The Hollow Men,” there is a prominent duality between the abstract and the manifest. This is most apparent in part V, where “the Shadow” continually falls between the thought of something and the act of carrying it out. Structuralists would have a field day here, but I will simply point out that this Shadow (presumably the war) is stunting everything, keeping things empty and meaningless. A thought without any associated action makes no impact on the world.
In short, though, “The Hollow Men” serves as an epitomic piece of Modern literature, running in the same vein as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Whether or not Eliot’s poem deals primarily with World War I or not (another strong theory is that it deals with his wife’s alleged affair with Bertrand Russell), it is safe to say that this work is a product of the age in which it was written.
