"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.