Quotes from book
The Hollow Men
"The Hollow Men" is a poem by T. S. Eliot. Its themes are, like those of many of Eliot's poems, overlapping and fragmentary, but it is recognized to be concerned most with post–World War I Europe under the Treaty of Versailles , the difficulty of hope and religious conversion, and, as some critics argue, Eliot's own failed marriage . The poem is divided into five parts and consists of 98 lines of which the last four are "probably the most quoted lines of any 20th-century poet writing in English".
Variant: Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
Source: The Hollow Men (1925)
“We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw.”
The Hollow Men (1925)
A quotation of a traditional Guy Fawkes Night saying
The Hollow Men (1925)
The Hollow Men (1925)
Context: 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.
[... ]
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
http://aduni.org/~heather/occs/honors/Notesonpoem.htm#fiftysevensixtyGathered on this beach of the tumid river
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear http://aduni.org/~heather/occs/honors/Notesonpoem.htm#sixtyonesixtytwo
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose http://aduni.org/~heather/occs/honors/Notesonpoem.htm#sixtyfoursixtythree
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.
The Hollow Men (1925)
Variant: Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow.
“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.
The Hollow Men (1925)
