The Hollow Men Summary & Analysis
by T. S. Eliot

Question about this poem?
Have a question about this poem?
Have a specific question about this poem?
Have a specific question about this poem?
Have a specific question about this poem?
A LitCharts expert can help.
A LitCharts expert can help.
A LitCharts expert can help.
A LitCharts expert can help.
A LitCharts expert can help.
Ask us
Ask us
Ask a question
Ask a question
Ask a question

The Full Text of “The Hollow Men”

Mistah Kurtz-he dead

        A penny for the Old Guy

        I

1We are the hollow men

2We are the stuffed men

3Leaning together

4Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

5Our dried voices, when

6We whisper together

7Are quiet and meaningless

8As wind in dry grass

9Or rats' feet over broken glass

10In our dry cellar

11Shape without form, shade without colour,

12Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

13Those who have crossed

14With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom

15Remember us-if at all-not as lost

16Violent souls, but only

17As the hollow men

18The stuffed men.

        II

19Eyes I dare not meet in dreams

20In death's dream kingdom

21These do not appear:

22There, the eyes are

23Sunlight on a broken column

24There, is a tree swinging

25And voices are

26In the wind's singing

27More distant and more solemn

28Than a fading star.

29Let me be no nearer

30In death's dream kingdom

31Let me also wear

32Such deliberate disguises

33Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves

34In a field

35Behaving as the wind behaves

36No nearer-

37Not that final meeting

38In the twilight kingdom

        III

39This is the dead land

40This is cactus land

41Here the stone images

42Are raised, here they receive

43The supplication of a dead man's hand

44Under the twinkle of a fading star.

45Is it like this

46In death's other kingdom

47Waking alone

48At the hour when we are

49Trembling with tenderness

50Lips that would kiss

51Form prayers to broken stone.

        IV

52The eyes are not here

53There are no eyes here

54In this valley of dying stars

55In this hollow valley

56This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

57In this last of meeting places

58We grope together

59And avoid speech

60Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

61Sightless, unless

62The eyes reappear

63As the perpetual star

64Multifoliate rose

65Of death's twilight kingdom

66The hope only

67Of empty men.

V

68Here we go round the prickly pear

69Prickly pear prickly pear

70Here we go round the prickly pear

71At five o'clock in the morning.

72Between the idea

73And the reality

74Between the motion

75And the act

76Falls the Shadow

77                                        For Thine is the Kingdom

78Between the conception

79And the creation

80Between the emotion

81And the response

82Falls the Shadow

83                                        Life is very long

84Between the desire

85And the spasm

86Between the potency

87And the existence

88Between the essence

89And the descent

90Falls the Shadow

91                                        For Thine is the Kingdom

92For Thine is

93Life is

94For Thine is the

95This is the way the world ends

96This is the way the world ends

97This is the way the world ends

98Not with a bang but a whimper.

The Full Text of “The Hollow Men”

Mistah Kurtz-he dead

        A penny for the Old Guy

        I

1We are the hollow men

2We are the stuffed men

3Leaning together

4Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

5Our dried voices, when

6We whisper together

7Are quiet and meaningless

8As wind in dry grass

9Or rats' feet over broken glass

10In our dry cellar

11Shape without form, shade without colour,

12Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

13Those who have crossed

14With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom

15Remember us-if at all-not as lost

16Violent souls, but only

17As the hollow men

18The stuffed men.

        II

19Eyes I dare not meet in dreams

20In death's dream kingdom

21These do not appear:

22There, the eyes are

23Sunlight on a broken column

24There, is a tree swinging

25And voices are

26In the wind's singing

27More distant and more solemn

28Than a fading star.

29Let me be no nearer

30In death's dream kingdom

31Let me also wear

32Such deliberate disguises

33Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves

34In a field

35Behaving as the wind behaves

36No nearer-

37Not that final meeting

38In the twilight kingdom

        III

39This is the dead land

40This is cactus land

41Here the stone images

42Are raised, here they receive

43The supplication of a dead man's hand

44Under the twinkle of a fading star.

45Is it like this

46In death's other kingdom

47Waking alone

48At the hour when we are

49Trembling with tenderness

50Lips that would kiss

51Form prayers to broken stone.

        IV

52The eyes are not here

53There are no eyes here

54In this valley of dying stars

55In this hollow valley

56This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

57In this last of meeting places

58We grope together

59And avoid speech

60Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

61Sightless, unless

62The eyes reappear

63As the perpetual star

64Multifoliate rose

65Of death's twilight kingdom

66The hope only

67Of empty men.

V

68Here we go round the prickly pear

69Prickly pear prickly pear

70Here we go round the prickly pear

71At five o'clock in the morning.

72Between the idea

73And the reality

74Between the motion

75And the act

76Falls the Shadow

77                                        For Thine is the Kingdom

78Between the conception

79And the creation

80Between the emotion

81And the response

82Falls the Shadow

83                                        Life is very long

84Between the desire

85And the spasm

86Between the potency

87And the existence

88Between the essence

89And the descent

90Falls the Shadow

91                                        For Thine is the Kingdom

92For Thine is

93Life is

94For Thine is the

95This is the way the world ends

96This is the way the world ends

97This is the way the world ends

98Not with a bang but a whimper.

  • “The Hollow Men” Introduction

    • “The Hollow Men” is a poem by the American modernist poet T.S. Eliot, first published in 1925. Uncanny and dream-like, “The Hollow Men” describes a desolate world, populated by empty, defeated people. Though the speaker describes these people as “dead” and the world they inhabit as the underworld (“death’s twilight kingdom”), the poem shouldn’t be read simply as a description of life after death. It's also a reflection on the sorry state of European culture after the First World War. For the speaker of the poem, the horrors of the war have plunged Europe into deep despair—so deep that European culture itself is fading away into nothingness.

  • “The Hollow Men” Summary

    • 1.

      The speaker declares that he is part of a group of empty people. These people are stuffed, perhaps like scarecrows, and lean against each other with their heads full of straw. "Oh well," the speaker says. Their voices are so dried-out that they can barely be heard when they whisper to each other, and what they say is as meaningless as the rustling of wind in dead grass, or the skittering of rats over shattered glass in a dry cellar.

      These men are bodies without definition, shadows without color, frozen strength, action without movement.

      Those who’ve crossed over to the other kingdom of the dead, looking straight ahead the whole time, don't remember these hollow men as lost, angry spirits (if they remember them at all), but rather as empty people, as people stuffed, metaphorically, with straw.

      2.

      The speaker sees eyes in his dreams but refuses to look back at them. In death's dream kingdom (perhaps a reference to Heaven), these eyes don’t appear. There (likely in the speaker's dream, though what "there" refers to is deliberately ambiguous), the eyes the speaker sees are like sunshine on a broken column. There, a tree is waving in the breeze and you can hear voices singing in the wind. Those voices are farther away and more somber than a dying star.

      The speaker doesn't want to get any closer (perhaps to those eyes) in death's dream kingdom. He also wants to wear elaborate disguises to conceal himself: the skin of a rat or a crow, sticks crossed in a field, twisting and turning like the wind. The speaker doesn't don’t want to be any closer—not even when having that final meeting in the shadowy world of death.

      3.

      This is the dead country, the speaker says, a land filled with cactus. Here, stone statues are erected and the dead bow down before them, under the light of a dying star.

      Is it like this in the other places where death is king, the speaker wonders (likely referencing to Heaven and/or Hell)? When the hollow men are walking alone and filled with love, instead of kissing someone they say prayers to the broken stone statues.

      4.

      The eyes aren’t here: there aren’t any eyes here, in this place where the stars die, in this empty valley, this broken jawbone, which once belonged to the body of a magnificent kingdom.

      This is the final meeting place. The hollow men walk blindly, silently, together; they gather on the shore of a swollen river.

      The hollow men are blind, unless their eyesight suddenly returns—like an undying star, like a rose with many leaves, a rose that belongs to death’s shadowy kingdom. That rose is the only hope for empty people like the hollow men.

      5.

      The hollow men are dancing around the cactus—a word the speaker repeats three times. Here they are dancing around the cactus at 5 a.m., the speaker says again.

      The speaker says that between an idea and its actual existence, between the desire and the fulfillment of that desire, there is a shadow. Because the kingdom belongs to You, the speaker—or, more likely, some new, unnamed entity—says, quoting the Bible.

      Between having an idea and making it real, between having a feeling and acting on it, there is a shadow. Life is very long, says the speaker or that same unnamed entity.

      Between desire and orgasm, between the power to create something and the thing that gets created, between the ideal and the disappointing reality, there is a shadow. Because the kingdom belongs to you, says a voice that may or may not be the speaker's once again.

      The speaker begins to repeats that phrase but stumbles: "Because yours is
      Life is
      Because yours is the..." and then the speaker trails off.

      This is how the world ends, the speaker says three times in a row. Not with a loud burst but with a quiet whimper.

  • “The Hollow Men” Themes

    • Theme Emptiness and Cultural Decay

      Emptiness and Cultural Decay

      In the opening line of “The Hollow Men,” the speaker makes a strange and unsettling announcement: he’s part of a group of “hollow” people. Moreover, he lives in a landscape which is itself “hollow.” As the poem proceeds, however, it becomes clear that the speaker’s hollowness is not strictly literal. Instead, it serves as an extended metaphor for the decay of European society and culture.

      The speaker describes himself—and his fellow “hollow men”—as inhuman, dangerous, and incapable of taking real action. For instance, in the first part of the poem, the speaker characterizes the hollow men's "voices" as "dried." Instead of sounding like normal human voices, full of emotion and information, they are “quiet and meaningless / As wind in dry grass.” In other words, their voices no longer sound like human voices—and their voices no longer carry information or emotion, like human voices are supposed to do. Instead, their voices have become as random and senseless as the wind itself. The “hollow men” are more than simply empty in the sense of being sad or despairing—rather, they’ve lost their humanity.

      And in the process, they’ve become a danger to human societies. In section two, the speaker describes himself wearing a “rat’s coat” and “crowskin.” These are symbols of disease and death, respectively, and they suggest that the “hollow men” are dangerous to be around. This is not because they’re necessarily bad or malicious; if they do damage to other people, it's because they happen to be contagious. Their despair is like a plague that passes from person to person.

      Indeed, the "hollow men" seem incapable of actually doing much of anything—much less being intentionally destructive. In section three, the speaker notes that they “would kiss” each other, but they can’t. Instead, they “form prayers to broken stone”—which implies that they are worshipping false idols. (For more about that, see the “Faith and Faithlessness” theme). And the “hollow men” can’t bring themselves to come into contact with each other or with other people; they aren’t able to act on their desires or impulses.

      However ineffective the “hollow men” are, however unable to act on their impulses, they nonetheless have a strong effect on the world around them. Indeed, the environment in which they live seems to have taken on their characteristics. For instance, the speaker describes the landscape as a “hollow valley” and as a desert, with only prickly cactuses for vegetation; the wind whistles mournfully through it. The landscape is just as hollow as they are.

      Yet while the “hollow men” are a danger to human communities, the landscape itself is an image of a damaged culture. In lines 22-23, the speaker says that in the desolate landscape where he lives “the eyes”—a symbol for God’s judgement—are like “sunlight on a broken column.” The column serves here as a symbol of Western Civilization and Western Culture: columns are one of the defining architectural features of ancient Greek and Roman temples. For such a symbol to be broken suggests that the landscape the speaker describes is more broadly symbolic of Western Civilization in decline.

      This serves as a helpful hint for how to understand the poem as a whole. Instead of being a piece of science fiction about a group of hollow people, it is a reflection on the state of European culture at the time of Eliot’s writing, right after World War I—a devastating war that shook many people’s faith in European culture and left behind a shattered generation of soldiers who survived. The poem’s judgment of European culture after World War I is very negative: the culture itself is in decline and the people who could preserve it are empty, ineffectual, and even dangerous to their own societies.

    • Theme Faith and Faithlessness

      Faith and Faithlessness

      On its surface, “The Hollow Men” is not a religious poem. Throughout, however, the speaker makes a series of subtle religious references and allusions. These references suggest that the “hollow men” have lost their connection to God. The speaker thus suggests that they might be restored—become fully human again—if they could regain their faith. At the same time, he also suggests that such renewed faith is impossible for the “hollow men.”

      The speaker of “The Hollow Men” regularly suggests that he and his companions have lost contact with God. For instance, in lines 41-43, the speaker describes the “hollow men” praying to “stone images.” This alludes to passages in the Bible where the Israelites stop worshipping God and instead start following false gods, which are often represented by “graven images.” When that happens in the Bible, God punishes the Israelites for failing to worship him properly. The allusion suggests that the “hollow men” are like the backsliding Israelites: they too have strayed from their religious commitments and fallen into idolatry.

      Similarly, the speaker describes the “hollow men” as blind, “sightless” in line 61. Their only hope for regaining their sight is a “multifoliate rose.” The “rose” is a traditional symbol of the Virgin Mary in Catholicism. The speaker thus suggests that the “hollow men” need the Virgin Mary’s help to regain their sight.

      These religious references reach their peak in the fifth section of the poem. In this section the poem quotes directly from the Book of Matthew: “Thine is the kingdom.” This is an allusion to a longer passage in which Christ says, “Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever, Amen.” Here Christ means that God is ruler of the Universe and always will be. However, the speaker doesn’t quote this passage from the Bible: instead it appears indented, in italics. This indicates that it is in a different voice: in other words, it’s not the “hollow men” speaking but someone else, who enters the poem briefly.

      The other voice is connected with God: whoever the voice is, he or she knows the Bible and is capable of quoting from it. The speaker, by contrast, can’t do that—when he tries, he ends up butchering the passage. “Thine is,” he says and then trails off; “Thine is the.” Something is blocking the speaker. This, in turn, seems to be the “shadow” that the speaker describes repeatedly in section five. The shadow is symbolic of anxiety, fear, and death. The "shadow" is powerful: it intervenes in some of the basic forces necessary for the universe to work (forces like desire and emotion) and prevents them from functioning properly. The shadow separates the "the idea" from "the reality," "the motion" from "the act," "the conception" from "the creation." Essentially, it is severing cause from effect, or action from meaning.

      To the speaker, the "shadow" seems unbeatable: he ends the poem imagining the world ending, simply puttering out: “not with a bang but a whimper.” As the shadow cuts off cause from effect, the world slowly runs down, unable to sustain itself. However, the allusion to the Bible earlier in the poem reminds the reader that—from a religious point of view—God should or at least could set it all right. The resources are there to restore the “hollow men”—and the culture they represent—to a full, healthy relationship with God. That they cannot regain this relationship suggests that such intimacy with God is permanently lost, at least in the world of this poem. Though the speaker longs nostalgically for a lost religious faith, he has given up trying to get it back.

  • Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Hollow Men”

    • Before Line 1

      Mistah Kurtz-he dead
              A penny for the Old Guy

      “The Hollow Men” begins with two epigraphs: quotes from (or allusions to) other texts that Eliot uses to guide his reader into the complicated and strange world of his poem.

      The first quote, “Mistah Kurtz-he dead,” comes from Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness. The novel is, in part, the story of Captain Kurtz—an ivory trader in colonial Africa who is held up as an example of European enlightenment but who loses his mind and goes to live in the bush and sets himself up as a god-like figure ruling over a group of natives. The quote thus suggests some of the concerns of Eliot’s poem: the poem is about the decline of European culture after World War I. Although Heart of Darkness was published before World War I, it anticipates Eliot’s feeling that European civilization was coming apart, and that its ideals were hollow at the core. Captain Kurtz represents Eliot’s greatest fear for his society: that it will turn its back on its own historical accomplishments and end up like Kurtz, “dead,” alone, empty.

      The second epigraph is a traditional saying. It comes from Guy Fawkes Day, which is celebrated in England on November 5th. Fawkes, a Catholic revolutionary, was arrested on November 5th, 1605 for plotting to blow up Parliament. To mark the occasion children would make effigies of Fawkes out of straw, sticks, and old clothes; they would then be burned on the night of the 5th. Children would go around asking strangers for “a penny for the Old Guy”—in other words, money to help them buy the supplies to construct their effigies. The speaker refers to Fawkes several times over the course of the poem; the effigies of him become an image of the “hollow men” themselves—fake, inhuman, destined for the fire.

    • Lines 1-4

      We are the hollow men
      We are the stuffed men
      Leaning together
      Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

    • Lines 5-10

      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 11-12

      Shape without form, shade without colour,
      Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

    • Lines 13-18

      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.

    • Lines 19-23

      Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
      In death's dream kingdom
      These do not appear:
      There, the eyes are
      Sunlight on a broken column

    • Lines 24-28

      There, is a tree swinging
      And voices are
      In the wind's singing
      More distant and more solemn
      Than a fading star.

    • Lines 29-32

      Let me be no nearer
      In death's dream kingdom
      Let me also wear
      Such deliberate disguises

    • Lines 33-38

      Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
      In a field
      Behaving as the wind behaves
      No nearer-
      Not that final meeting
      In the twilight kingdom

    • Lines 39-44

      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.

    • Lines 45-51

      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.

    • Lines 52-56

      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

    • Lines 57-60

      In this last of meeting places
      We grope together
      And avoid speech
      Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

    • Lines 61-67

      Sightless, unless
      The eyes reappear
      As the perpetual star
      Multifoliate rose
      Of death's twilight kingdom
      The hope only
      Of empty men.

    • Lines 68-71

      Here we go round the prickly pear
      Prickly pear prickly pear
      Here we go round the prickly pear
      At five o'clock in the morning.

    • Lines 72-77

      Between the idea
      And the reality
      Between the motion
      And the act
      Falls the Shadow
                                              For Thine is the Kingdom

    • Lines 78-83

      Between the conception
      And the creation
      Between the emotion
      And the response
      Falls the Shadow
                                              Life is very long

    • Lines 84-91

      Between the desire
      And the spasm
      Between the potency
      And the existence
      Between the essence
      And the descent
      Falls the Shadow
                                              For Thine is the Kingdom

    • Lines 92-94

      For Thine is
      Life is
      For Thine is the

    • Lines 95-98

      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.

  • “The Hollow Men” Symbols

    • Symbol Straw

      Straw

      In line 4, the speaker says that the “hollow men” have “headpiece[s] stuffed with straw.” In other words, they have straw inside their heads instead of brains. The poem is strange and surreal, so the reader might imagine this to be literally true—and picture a group of people with heads full of straw. But the “straw” here plays a primarily symbolic role. It represents the emptiness of the “hollow men.” Straw is a proverbially worthless substance, something cheap, that animals eat. To have a head stuffed with “straw” thus suggests that the “hollow men” have nothing of value inside their minds: their thoughts are empty, useless, and worthless.

      Straw was also used by children in England to create effigies of Guy Fawkes, the Catholic radical who tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament in the 1600s. (The poem’s second epigraph, “a penny for the Old Guy” is something children would say to get money to make their Guy Fawkes effigies). These “stuffed” “straw” men thus seem to be effigies themselves: figures constructed to be burned.

    • Symbol Wind

      Wind

      In line 8, the speaker notes that the “voices” of the “hollow men” are like “wind in dry grass.” In other words, as he notes in line 7, they are both “quiet and meaningless.” The wind here is thus a symbol for something meaningless and empty, devoid of human intelligence.

      This is a surprising and potentially upsetting symbol. After all, the human voice is usually full of intelligence and meaning: it’s what people use to communicate ideas, plans, and emotions with each other. But the hollow men’s voices have lost this intelligence. They have become as empty and inhuman as the wind itself. The symbol repeats in lines 26 and 35, where the speaker uses it again to emphasize meaninglessness and emptiness of the world where the "hollow men" live—and their own emptiness as well.

    • Symbol Eyes

      Eyes

      In lines 19-21, the speaker says something strange. There are “eyes” that he sees in his “dreams.” He doesn’t dare to look at these eyes: there’s something troubling or embarrassing about them. But in “death’s dream kingdom” those eyes “do not appear.” It’s clear that these “eyes” are powerful and important to the speaker, but it’s not clear right away who they belong to—or what they represent.

      This passage is at least in part an allusion to Dante's Purgatory and Paradise. When Dante encounters Beatrice—a woman he loves—in both of those poems, he can't look her in the eyes. She is so beautiful, pure, and holy that Dante feels like it would be disrespectful, even shameful to look at her with his own ordinary gaze. Through the allusion, then, the "eyes" become symbolic. The “eyes” are a symbol everything pure, holy, and good—as well as for truth and judgment.

      The hollow men dare not meet these eyes because they don't want to be judged, don't want to face the truth of who they are. By contrast, note how those "who have crossed ... to death's other Kingdom"—that is, who have moved on to Heaven—walked with "direct eyes." Where the hollow men avoid the judging gaze of "eyes" even in dreams, those other people have moved forward with eyes straight ahead, willing to look truthfully upon themselves and embrace judgment.

      Indeed, the eyes ultimately can be thought of as a symbol for God and the way God watches over human life and judges human actions. In “death’s dream kingdom,” the speaker has lost contact with God and his watchful, judgmental eyes. Indeed, in “death’s dream kingdom,” eyes have lost their power: they become, simply, “sunlight on a broken column.”

      The speaker returns to "eyes" in the poem's fourth section. In lines 52-53, he notes "The eyes are not here / There are no eyes here." And in lines 61-62, he describes the hollow men as "Sightless, unless / The eyes reappear." The speaker continues to use "eyes" as a symbol in these instances, drawing on its resonance from earlier in the poem. The "eyes" continue to be symbols of God's power to judge and monitor peoples' lives. And the "sightless" "hollow men" have thus lost their connection with God—they are spiritually blind.

    • Symbol Broken Column

      Broken Column

      In lines 22-23, the speaker describes the “eyes” in “death’s dream kingdom” as “sunlight on a broken column.” These lines are complicated and difficult to parse—with different symbols and metaphors nesting inside of one other. In other to understand what’s happening here, recall that, at the start of section II, the speaker uses “Eyes” as a symbol for God’s judgement, the way God watches over human beings. The speaker sees these eyes “in dreams”—or he did, before he came to “death’s dream kingdom.” Here, “these do not appear.” Instead they are “sunlight on a broken column.”

      The “broken column” might be a symbol for the decay of European culture. The column is closely associated with Greek and Roman architecture and, more broadly, with classical cultures—which were the foundation of European civilization. The "sunlight" is a metaphor for the way that God’s judgment feels in the underworld, where the speaker and the “hollow men” live. So here, God, as “sunlight” on the “broken column,” simply throws light on the decline and decay of European culture—instead of judging or shaping it.

      In other words, the metaphor and the symbol, working together, suggest that God is not very powerful in the underworld, that he cannot do much to stop the decay of Western civilization, which the “broken column” symbolizes.

    • Symbol Rat's Coat

      Rat's Coat

      In lines 32-33, the speaker describes himself wearing a series of “deliberate disguises,” including a “Rat’s coat.” In other words, he is wearing rat’s fur—or perhaps he is simply dressed up as a rat. Since rats often carry diseases and spread them to human beings, the rats serve here as symbols for disease itself. In describing himself as wearing a “rat’s coat,” the speaker thus treats himself as a carrier of disease: indeed, he is an embodiment of illness and sickness. The speaker thus understands himself as contagious: his desperate spiritual condition might spread to the people around him. As a "hollow man," he is someone who endangers others' health and well-being.

    • Symbol Crowskin

      Crowskin

      After the speaker describes himself wearing a “Rat’s coat” as one of his “deliberate disguises,” he adds another disguise: “crowskin.” The rat is a symbol of disease; the crow takes things further. It is a traditional symbol of death. In other words, by wearing “crowskin,” the speaker makes himself into a symbol of death. And once again, the speaker subtly insists that he is a danger to human communities: that he brings not only sickness, but also death.

    • Symbol Crossed Staves

      Crossed Staves

      In lines 32-33, the speaker describes himself wearing a series of "deliberate disguises," including "crossed staves." The "crossed staves"—sticks or wooden poles—might represent scarecrows or the effigies of Guy Fawkes that the speaker references throughout. They serve as symbols, then, for the emptiness and inhumanity of the “hollow men.” Instead of being real, flesh-and-blood human beings, they are made of straws and sticks; they are designed to be burned. This symbol thus breaks with the previous two, the “rat’s coat” and “crowskin” the “hollow men” wear. Where those were symbols of sickness and death—and suggested that the “hollow men” are dangerous to human society—the “crossed staves” suggest that the “hollow men” shouldn’t be taken so seriously, that they’re not actually all that scary. They’re just scarecrows, effigies, built by children and designed to be burned.

    • Symbol Star

      Star

      Throughout the poem, the speaker uses stars as symbols. In line 25-28, the speaker notes that the “voices … in the wind’s singing / [are] more distant and more solemn / Than a fading star.” In line 44, the speaker describes the “hollow men” praying to “stone images”—idols—“under the twinkle of a fading star.” And in line 63, he describes the possibility that the hollow men’s “eyes” will “reappear” as a “perpetual star.”

      In each of these cases, the stars have a consistent symbolic meaning. They represent hope and redemption. Their light promises that the suffering of the “hollow men” might be made meaningful, that the world they live in might be renewed. But the speaker describes them consistently as “fading”: a “perpetual star” only appears as a fantasy, an impossible dream. In other words, there are symbols of hope in the poem, but they are fading fast, disappearing from the world in which the hollow men live.

    • Symbol Tumid River

      Tumid River

      In line 60, the speaker describes the “hollow men” gathered together on the “beach of the tumid river.” Tumid means “overflowing” or “swollen.” In other words, the river is about to flood. This is a surprising image, since otherwise the speaker stresses the dryness and desolation of the world where the “hollow men” live. But the “tumid river” is at least partially a symbol. And as a symbol, it works well with the otherwise desolate, desert landscape of the poem. A “tumid river” is a violent river: a river that’s about to flood and do serious damage to the landscape around it. As a symbol, then, the river suggests the violence of the European culture hasn’t simply disappeared with the end of the First World War. Although Europe has become a desolate, ruined place, its violence could spill over at any point and do even more damage.

      The river is also an allusion to the River of Acheron, which, in Dante's Inferno, makes up the border of Hell. The fact that the hollow men have not crossed this river—and instead are stuck on its "beach," or shore—indicates that they weren't especially good or bad in life; not good enough for Heaven, at least, and not bad enough for Hell. This reflects the earlier statement in section I, where the speaker says those who have crossed will remember the hollow men "not as lost / Violent souls," and instead as relatively impotent, "stuffed" figures.

    • Symbol Multifoliate Rose

      Multifoliate Rose

      In line 64, the speaker suggests that the hollow men’s sight might return as a “mutifoliate rose.” In other words, it might become a rose with a lot of leaves. This is metaphor: their eyes aren’t going to literally turn into a rose. But, in order to understand the metaphor, one has to understand what the rose means symbolically. The rose is a traditional symbol of the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus in the Christian New Testament. In Catholicism, the Virgin Mary is even sometimes called the “mystic rose.” For the hollow men’s eyes to return as a “multifoliate rose” thus means that their sight will be restored by the Virgin Mary herself. The speaker seems to consider this unlikely, though. He calls it the “hope only / of empty men.”

    • Symbol Shadow

      Shadow

      In lines 76, 82, and 90, the speaker announces that “the Shadow” “falls.” As the speaker describes it, “the Shadow” interrupts a series of key things. For instance, it cuts off an “emotion” from a “response.” In other words, “the Shadow” makes it difficult for the hollow men to act on their emotions, or to move from having an “idea” and making it a “reality.”

      The speaker never explains what the “Shadow” is, but its symbolic characteristics give the reader some ideas. The shadow might symbolize fear, anxiety, or even death itself. These forces, the speaker suggest, cut off cause and effect, leading to a universe where nothing works right.

  • “The Hollow Men” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

    • End-Stopped Line

      "The Hollow Men" is a poem about a decaying, disorganized world, and it often uses specific poetic devices to emphasize the disorder and chaos of the world it describes. That’s the case with the poem’s end-stops. When a poet uses end-stop in a regular pattern, it can give a poem a sense of organization: it’s one of the ways a poet exhibits their control over their poem. But “The Hollow Man” has no such regular pattern when it comes to end-stops. Instead, its end-stops appear unpredictably, irregularly.

      Often the poem will go long stretches without using end-stop at all, as in lines 61-67 (from "Sightless, unless ... Of empty men."): the stanza is entirely enjambed, at least until its final line. The end-stop, when it arrives in line 67, thus feels almost apocalyptic: like the end of the world.

      That feeling is even stronger in the poem’s final four lines. In contrast to the strongly enjambed stanza in lines 61-67, all of these lines are end-stopped (yes, even despite the lack of punctuation!). These end-stops underline the definitive ending that they describe: the end of the world, the apocalypse itself. As they do so, they also emphasize how disorderly the poem is: sometimes using long runs of enjambment, sometimes falling into steady, regular end-stops. The poem seems to work to prevent the reader from feeling comfortable, from feeling like there is an established pattern to hold on to.

      To make matters even more confusing, the poem does not use punctuation in a standard way—so the reader has to pay attention to the structure of the speaker’s sentences to tell where end-stops fall. For instance, line 30 ("In death's dream kingdom") has no punctuation at the end of it, but it marks the end of the sentence that starts in line 29, “Let me be no nearer…” In line 31, a new sentence with a parallel structure begins: “Let me also wear…” Line 30 is thus clearly end-stopped—but only a reader paying careful attention to the structure of the speaker’s sentences would notice the end-stop. This means that there are some ambiguous cases in the poem, lines that could be called either end-stopped or enjambed, depending on how the reader interprets the poem's grammar.

      For example, line 46 ("In death's other kingdom") might be the end of a question that starts in line 45 ("Is it like this"). Properly punctuated, the sentence would read, "Is it like this in death's other kingdom?" But one could also read the whole stanza as one long question, in which case line 46 would be enjambed.

      The lack of regular punctuation thus makes the poem feel even more irregular and disordered: even the poem’s punctuation seems to be decaying, losing its integrity. And it also makes it harder for the reader to arrive at a definitive sense of whether something is end-stopped or not.

    • Enjambment

    • Caesura

    • Alliteration

    • Assonance

    • Consonance

    • Repetition

    • Simile

    • Metaphor

    • Extended Metaphor

    • Allusion

  • "The Hollow Men" Vocabulary

    Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

    • Mistah Kurtz
    • Old Guy
    • Headpiece
    • Paralysed
    • Gesture
    • Motion
    • Solemn
    • Deliberate
    • Crowskin
    • Staves
    • Supplication
    • Grope
    • Tumid
    • Perpetual
    • Multifoliate
    • Thine
    • Conception
    • Creation
    • Spasm
    • Potency
    • Existence
    • Essence
    • Descent
    • Mister Kurtz is a character in Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness. Kurtz, a European ivory trader in colonial Africa is seen as a symbol of European progress and enlightenment, but goes insane, disappears into the jungle, and makes himself into a god-like figure.

  • Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Hollow Men”

    • Form

      “The Hollow Men” does not follow a standard form. Instead, the poem is written in free verse and broken up into five sections differentiated by numerals. It doesn't have a regular rhyme scheme or meter, and its stanzas vary in length: some as short as two lines, some as long as ten. As a result, the poem can feel chaotic, even disorganized: it never establishes a pattern; as soon as the reader gets used to something, the poem changes.

      In a poem about the traumas of World War I and the failure of European culture, this formal disorganization is important and significant. Poetic forms like the sonnet or the sestina are often felt to be impressive and important parts of the legacy of European cultures. The poem’s failure to adhere to those forms is another sign that Europe is breaking down, losing its cultural power. The poem becomes another piece of “broken stone,” another piece of evidence that magnificence of European culture is decaying.

      The first section of the poem provides a good example of this. The first 10 lines of the poem are relatively organized. Though they don’t exactly fall into a set meter, they’re generally around six syllables a line. And there are a number of rhymes and slant rhymes, like “men” and “when” and “Alas” and “meaningless.” Even if the poem doesn’t follow a set form, it feels like it could, like it’s almost there: just on the brink of being formally organized.

      But lines 11 and 12 break this shaky, partial formal pattern. They are much longer: 9 and 10 syllables, respectively. And the speaker switches from a sustained 10-line stanza to a couplet. Just as the poem starts to gain momentum and coherence, the couplet interrupts that momentum. And the next stanza doesn’t reestablish the shaky pattern from the first stanza. Reading through the first section of the poem, one experiences its form as something broken, in tatters—just like the civilization the poem describes.

    • Meter

      “The Hollow Men” is written in free verse, which means that it doesn’t follow a set meter. Some free verse poems nonetheless find a solid, steady rhythm. A poem like Walt Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing” is a good example of this: though the number of syllables in each line changes, the poem uses anaphora and other devices to create a strong rhythm. “The Hollow Men” is different: the poem’s rhythm keeps changing, shifting. It never settles down, never finds a solid, steady pattern.

      Take a look at lines 45-51, for example. The shortest line, line 47, has three syllables: “Waking alone.” One could describe this as iambic dimeter (a line of two iambs, which are poetic feet with an unstressed-stressed syllable pattern) with an initial trochee (stressed-unstressed)—a very unusual meter. But there’s no point in doing so, because that meter never reappears in the stanza.

      By comparison, the next line, “At the hour when we are” could be broken into two trochees and an iamb. The rhythm is totally different. This means that the reader doesn’t really experience the poem as having a rhythm. After all, rhythm requires repetition, a pattern. “The Hollow Men” no sooner establishes a pattern than it breaks it again.

      In this way, the poem’s meter models the chaos and emptiness that the poem describes. The poem lines are like “the broken stones” to which the hollow men pray. And, like the “hollow men” the poem’s meter is “shape without form … gesture without motion.” In a broader sense, then, the poem’s meter echoes the poem’s critique of European civilization—a civilization that the speaker thinks is in decline, losing its coherence.

    • Rhyme Scheme

      “The Hollow Men” does not follow a standard rhyme scheme. It does use some rhyme—just not in a predictable, orderly way. Instead, rhymes come and go, appearing in short bursts and then disappearing again. For instance, in lines 78-80, the speaker rhymes “conception,” “creation,” and “emotion.” These rhymes are very weak, since they only rhyme the last syllable of each word. But they do create a sense of momentum and organization: the poem seems to be speeding up, becoming more and more passionate and intense. Then, without warning, the rhyme disappears: lines 81 and 82 end with the words “response” and “shadow"—which don't rhyme with each other or rhyme with the previous lines.

      This happens often in the poem: the speaker will employ rhyme for a little bit, giving the reader the sense that the poem is starting to fall into a rhyme scheme and then abruptly break it off. And the speaker often also uses partial or failed kinds of rhyme, like that slant rhyme between “meaningless” and “grass” in lines 7-8. For the reader, the poem thus feels jerky: it keeps starting and stopping, accelerating and braking. It never settles into a comfortable rhythm, a steady set of rhymes.

      The poem’s erratic and unpredictable rhymes thus mirror the state of decay and desolation that the poem describes. Like the “hollow men,” who seem unable to complete anything they start, who are “gesture without motion,” the poem’s rhymes gather energy only to see it disappear. The poem's rhymes are as lethargic and defeated as the "hollow men" are.

  • “The Hollow Men” Speaker

    • The speaker of “The Hollow Men” is part of a group of exhausted, defeated people: he calls them, in the poem’s first line, “the hollow men.” Speaking for this group, the speaker describes them as empty, without substance. In line 4, he says their heads are “filled with straw,” and in line 7, that their voices are “quiet and meaningless.” Instead of helping or taking care of each other, they spend their time groping around blindly and “pray[ing] to broken stone,” as the speaker notes in line 51. In other words, the “hollow men” are worse than empty and ineffective—they are praying to the wrong gods. For a Christian poet like Eliot, this is a serious problem.

      The speaker never clarifies who these “hollow men” are exactly—how many people make up the group, where they come from, how old they are. If they had lives before they arrived in the desolate, desert world where they live, the speaker doesn’t acknowledge or explain it. Their past has been cut away from them: all they have is this empty, bleak world.

      The lack of specific, concrete detail about the speaker and the fantastical, uncanny character of the world they live in—a world which the speaker repeatedly suggests is some version of Hell or purgatory—have led many readers to understand the speaker (and the “hollow men”) more generally as an extended metaphor for the state of European Culture after the First World War. In this reading, the “hollow men” represent the generation that fought in and survived the war—emerging from it permanently scarred, unable to participate in or preserve their culture.

      In the fifth section of the poem, another voice enters. The poem marks it as different by putting it in italics and orienting it on the right margin of the poem. This voice quotes from two different texts, the Bible and a novel by Joseph Conrad, An Outcast of the Islands. This other voice is able to recite directly and precisely from these texts. This is especially striking with the Biblical quotations, because it suggests an ongoing intimacy with God. The speaker of the rest of the poem doesn't have that intimacy. When he tries to repeat the quotes in lines 92-4, he is only capable of producing fragments of them: "For thine is the." It might be possible for someone to have an intimate relationship with God—but not for the "hollow men." Even when they hear words straight from the Bible, they can only reproduce damaged, useless fragments of it. And the final four lines add one more wrinkle: it's not clear who is speaking as the poem ends—the speaker, the other voice, even both at once.

  • “The Hollow Men” Setting

    • The speaker describes the poem's setting, several times and in several different ways, as some version of either Hell, the underworld, or purgatory. In section II, the speaker calls it “death’s dream kingdom.” In section IV, the speaker calls it “death’s twilight kingdom.” Because these descriptions are so different from each other, some readers have thought that sections II and IV, each describe a separate place, a separate “kingdom” of death. This is a plausible and convincing reading of an ambiguous and difficult poem. But it could be, equally, a single place that the speaker describes in different ways over the course of the poem.

      In any case, the landscape of the underworld, as the speaker describes it, is consistently bleak and desolate. The speaker calls it “cactus land”: a desert. It seems to be a distinctly hopeless place: the speaker calls it a “valley of dying stars.” It is full of ruins and damaged objects, “broken stone” and “broken column.” These ruins serve as symbols for a European culture, and their damaged status suggest that culture is in decline. But it is not entirely a desolate desert: it also contains a “tumid river”—that is, an overflowing river. It is at once dry, bleak—and about to flood. This river is an allusion to the Acheron river, which in Dante's Inferno surrounds Hell. The fact that the hollow men sit on the shores of the river suggests they're indeed in a sort of purgatory; that they aren't actively malicious forces, but rather, in their indifference, cowardice, or timidity, also haven't actively sought to do good in the world.

      It's possible to read the poem’s setting as an extended metaphor for the cultural condition of Europe after the First World War, just as the speaker (and the “hollow men” he speaks for) serves as an extended metaphor for the shattered lives of the generation that fought in the war. Like the speaker, the landscape is a register for the contradictions and traumas of that culture: it is simultaneously damaged and desolate (represented by the desert) and overflowing with violent energy (represented the river). It is stuck in a sort of stagnant purgatory, with hope fading, distanced from truth and God. This is a world slowly petering out—as the speaker says, "Not with a bang but a whimper."

  • Literary and Historical Context of “The Hollow Men”

    • Literary Context

      “The Hollow Men” is one of the most famous poems of a literary movement called "Modernism." Modernism began in Europe around 1870 and lasted until about 1945. "Modernism" is an umbrella term, developed by scholars after the movement was finished, to describe a wide array of writers and artists—often with very different, even opposite aims and goals. However, there are some underlying interests that unite these groups. All of these artists confronted a society that was radically changing: becoming more urban, more industrial, less rural, less agricultural, less bound by tradition and religion. They wanted to develop new artistic and literary forms, and they felt that the old ways of painting and writing weren’t appropriate for the new realities of their societies. They simply couldn’t describe the changes that society was undergoing—because they emerged from a much older social order.

      Some of these artists were excited and enthusiastic about the changes in society. Others mourned the loss of the old world. T.S. Eliot was one of those who felt deeply alienated by the changes to society and wanted to recover the past. At the same time, Eliot recognized that these changes were so big and important that it would be almost impossible to do so. So he tried to develop poetic forms, ways of writing, that would express his own sense of alienation and loss.

      In his poems from the 1920s, in particular—poems like “The Hollow Men” and “The Wasteland”—Eliot turns to fragments, assembling scraps together to form poems that jump around unpredictably. These fragments are supposed to register a society that’s decaying, falling apart, losing its identity. “The Hollow Men” is thus a prime example of a modernist poem. It tries to express the shattered condition of European culture after the First World War—and it does so by breaking the traditional rules of poetry. It is innovative, inventing new ways of writing. But its innovation is designed to demonstrate to the reader the extent of the damage which the War has done to its speaker—and the culture he represents.

      Historical Context

      “The Hollow Men” was written over the early 1920s. The finished version first appeared in 1925, but it brings together pieces that Eliot had written and published as early as 1921. The poem was thus written in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, a catastrophic and world changing event. Though Eliot did not fight in the war, one of his closest friends, Jean Verdenal, did and died at the Battle of Gallipoli in 1915. (Some scholars have speculated that the two were lovers.)

      Like many in his generation, Eliot was devastated by the war. It was, for one thing, a very bloody war, with millions dead on both sides. And as the war dragged on, it became harder and harder to justify. In bloody battles in France, hundreds of thousands of soldiers were slaughtered in exchange for a few inches of ground. The war created a crisis of confidence in European culture. Before the war, many were deeply confident that European countries had advanced so far that they no longer need war, that they were past violence and barbarism. The intense violence of the War showed that just the opposite was true: that the increased power of industrial societies allowed for killing on a scale never seen before in human history. After the war, traumatized by the violence they’d seen and adrift in a culture that had lost confidence in itself, many members of Eliot’s generation became pale shells of their former selves: “hollow men.”

  • More “The Hollow Men” Resources