Amidst all the talk of the world ending, a single line kept coming into my mind: "This is the way the world ends; not with a bang, but a whimper."
These are the concluding lines from TS Eliot's "The Hollow Men," a poem that has been constantly popping into my head for the past few months. It is a combination of allusion and symbolism that creates such a fearfully wonderful view of how it all very well might end.
As I am a complete and total geek, the following is my analysis and interpretation of the imagery and symbolism presented in Eliot's "The Hollow Men". I would like to emphasize that this is my own interpretation, and I therefore reserve the right to be wrong about it. I also encourage any and all readers who wish to disagree or add to my analysis to do so civilly in the comment section (I do love a good literary discussion!)
"The Hollow Men" is divided up into five different sections through which the reader may follow the story of these hollow men for whom the poem is named. Many references are made to Greek mythology's concept of the afterlife, and a few critics have linked the poem to Canto 3 of Dante's Inferno. The lines combine together to form an image of the end of the world, as Eliot imagines it to be. This analysis will briefly go through each of the five parts then conclude with the author's general remarks.
The poem opens with two epitaphs: one from Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" and one from an old children's song requesting money for fireworks to burn effigies on Guy Fawkes Day in Britain. The first simply announces the death of the main character, while the second alludes to the act of paying off the man from whom the fireworks were purchased. Perhaps Eliot is alluding to the death of the speaker and his subsequent descent into an effigy-like existence as described in the five main parts of the poem.
Part I starts with a declaration: "We are the hollow men/We are the stuffed men". The first section of this poem creates the image of a group of scarecrow-like beings "leaning together/headpieces filled with straw". The speaker describes the group's whisperings as "quiet and meaningless/As wind in dry grass/Or rats' feet over broken glass/In our dry cellar", eliciting the image of beings that are only partially real. The ethereal existence of these hollow men continues to be conjured for the readers' imagination throughout the rest of Part I. The last stanza finally sheds light on who these hollow men are. From the description, the reader can conclude that these hollow yet stuffed men are basically shadows of men they used to be. They are perhaps dead yet unable to cross over into "death's other Kingdom" and those who crossed over "with direct eyes" remember them only as these vague paradoxical shadows that seem to haunt the other shore. Who are the hollow men? They are those who are dead to the living yet unable to join the dead.
In the second part, the allusion to eyes in the first part is expanded to contrast the direct eyes of those who have crossed over into Hades. The speaker refuses to make direct eye contact with those who pass over to the other shore, and he describes the things that the dead are seeing "in death's dream kingdom". He then makes a strange request: "Let me be no nearer/In death's dream kingdom" as well as requesting to always remain the scarecrow that he has disguised himself as and to go "No nearer/Not that final meeting place/In the twilight kingdom." The speaker seems to hold a fear of what may be on the other side of this divide for him, and so he lingers on Earth as a mere shadow of what he once was.
The images in Part III paint a picture of a desert, dry and lifeless, but the "stone images" and "supplication of a dead man's hand" combine together to also form a portrayal of a cemetery where the hollow men listlessly spend their days. Within this part is also told a tragic piece of the speaker's story: "Lips that would kiss/Form prayers to broken stone." This reader cannot help but be filled with the vision of a scarecrow leaning over the grave of his lost love who he will never see again because he refuses to cross willingly into Death's kingdom.
Eyes are again a major theme in Part IV. If the reader divines "this last of meeting places" to be the cemetery of Part III, the images of death and desolation deepen the despair felt by the speaker as the world around him keeps slipping away. As in Parts I and II, the eyes seem to symbolize the correct order of man: those with eyes have passed into Death's kingdom; those who refuse to see or now cannot see for lack of eyes are wandering against the natural order and are now gathering on the banks of the river that divides the two worlds. The eye becomes the one hope of these hollow men who have gathered to try to now cross into the kingdom that they have long avoided because they realize that there is nothing left for them "in this valley of dying stars."
The final part of this poem is the longest and, in this reader's opinion, the most poignant part. Within Part V, the speaker creates a summary of the emptiness that is the world of the hollow men. It begins with an adaptation of a children's song, incorporating the desert imagery from Part III and creating the whimsical feeling of something circling round and round. Then comes a description of "the Shadow" and where it falls. The Shadow falls in spaces that are so small and abstract that the reader gets the haunting feeling that it is everywhere. As the speaker continues, he becomes unable to finish his sentences, including a portion of The Lord's Prayer. And finally the speaker completely fade and the reader is left with a haunting song:
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 plight of the hollow men is very similar to the plight of most humans. They cling so steadfastly to the familiar things around them until they are clutching only dust and dirty headstones in a graveyard of lost dreams. They fear death to the point of disrupting the natural process by which they should go and linger on a shore where they have no purpose and no passion for anything. They hang almost lifelessly in the wind like scarecrows. They fight so hard for their world to not end, but in the end they slip away and fade into the Shadow just like everything else. For this reason, Eliot concludes that the world will end "Not with a bang but a whimper."
While some may view this poem as depressing and somewhat lacking in hope, I find it to be somehow comforting. The Shadow of which this poem speaks does not have to represent a sinister power, though shadows often do. I feel rather that this poem speaks to the idea that there is a natural order to the world, a way in which things were meant to be. Those who follow this order pass from one shore to the next with direct eyes, never doubting what may or may not lie ahead. Those who avert their eyes from the path and choose to fight it are left hollow and lifeless, shadows themselves of what they once were until they finally accept the comforting hope that was offered to them before the struggle had even begun. It is a very unique way of looking at the way the world works. I do admit that it sounds as though I advocate just letting things happen to you without a fight; on the contrary, I would say that this poem is more of a testament to absolute truth. In this particular case, the absolute truth is that there is something waiting for you after death in this world, whether it be heaven or hell. Because this is an absolute, there is no escaping it. One may, like the hollow men, prolong the journey, but the absolute is still there.
As it is now December 22, 2012, I suppose that the world will end in neither a bang nor a whimper quite yet. Just as Eliot supposed, the end of the world is simply destined to be anticlimactic. While I am by no means an expert in poetry analysis, I hope you've been inspired to think a bit about what you can learn from The Hollow Men. I certainly have. Until next apocalypse...
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