“He Do the [Poet] in Different Voices”: Eyes, You, and I in “The Hollow Men”
Abstract: Seeking a responsible reading of The Waste Land is aided by attending to its relation to “The Hollow Men,” published as a whole three years later. Here, too, tonal shifts are frequent and critical. The later poem continues much of the earlier (Guy Fawkes, for example, representing aborted efforts that “The Hollow Men” also emphasizes in the way “the Shadow” “comes between” various efforts). “The Hollow Men” does, however, veer from The Waste Land in proposing the necessity of facing “the eyes” capable of revealing the darkness of the human heart.
Atkins, G. Douglas. T.S. Eliot and the Failure to Connect: Satire and Modern Misunderstandings. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137364692.
A familiar question concerns Eliot’s way from “The Hollow Men” in 1925 to Ash-Wednesday five years later. The verse is different, to be sure, but poets are always bent on “saying it new” and “growing” their medium. At one point in his so-called conversion poem, Eliot writes of “restoring / With a new verse the ancient rhyme.”1 It is the “ancient rhyme” that interests us non-poets, the return to a way of seeing that seems increasingly outmoded, that set of analogies by which medieval men understood the universe. How does Eliot get to the avowedly Christian perspective from that other and different one—whatever it be precisely—that now appears all the more “semblable” to us, inhabitants of “the waste land” and perhaps “hollow men”?
That is not the question with which I begin this consideration, at least not directly. Mine would appear simpler, if less familiar. Our question is not how we get to “The Hollow Men” from The Waste Land, three years earlier, as one might suppose, accustomed as we are to read the great poem as modern in point of view and (therefore) non-, if not anti-Christian. Rather, the question is the relation of the two works. I will argue that it is closer than generally recognized. The verse is different, to be sure, but both poems are made of separable but integrated parts that feature a variety of voices, all of them requiring the most scrupulous attention and, specifically, invoking the use of the two “tools” of criticism that Eliot had identified in The Sacred Wood as “comparison and analysis.”2
If for no other reason than its brevity, heavily accentuated by the shortness of the verses themselves, “The Hollow Men” is enigmatic, arguably more so than The Waste Land (and nearly as much as Ash-Wednesday). In ways, it rhymes with that earlier poem; more, it appears directly to recall it, to ask that they be related one to the other: for example, “This is the dead land / This is cactus land / Here the stone images” and “the wind in dry grass / Or rats’ feet over broken glass / In our dry cellar.”3 The children’s song that erupts into “The Hollow Men” in its last section—“Here we go round the prickly pear”—may recall and reverberate with such lines in The Waste Land as “O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag.” Both poems are made of fragments, the later in a more rhetorically significant and thematically charged fashion.
Critics have generally been neither kind to nor particularly perceptive concerning “The Hollow Men.” In his 1959 book, still a seminal study of Eliot, Hugh Kenner revealed even his difficulties in face of the poem as he affirmed an important link to The Waste Land:
Social, moral, historical, and poetic vacuity are revolved before us in this remarkable poem which, in fewer words than The Waste Land has lines, articulates, one is convinced, everything remaining that The Waste Land for one reason or another omitted to say, and by rhythmic means enacts the failure of rhythm; and in inactivity protracts, for just as many lines as are required for full articulation, a poetic action.4
We should remember that the poem, like Ash-Wednesday and Four Quartets, is a composite; it was first published in parts: I in Winter 1924, III in 1924, II and IV in January 1925, then I, II, and IV in March 1925, the composite as we know it appearing in Poems 1909–1925, published in late November 1925 and having for the first time the fifth and final section.
At least one critic believes that Eliot’s “sense of the wholeness of ‘The Hollow Men’ must have come late in the day,” for unlike with The Waste Land, he allowed only one section to be anthologized in June 1925.5 Actually, Eliot harbored serious misgivings about the poem, writing to Pound in October: “Is it too bad to print? If not, can anything be done to it? Can it be cleaned up in any way? I feel I want something about this length (IV–V) to end the volume [that is, Poems 1909–1925] as post-Waste.”6 As for The Waste Land, Eliot wrote to Gilbert Seldes, managing editor of The Dial, in late 1922: “I find this poem as far behind me as Prufrock now: my present ideas are very different.”7 Eliot echoed this position three days later in a letter to Richard Aldington: “As for ‘The Waste Land’, that is a thing of the past so far as I am concerned and I am now feeling toward a new form and style.”8
Eliot’s misgivings about “The Hollow Men” did not hold up publication of the new book, published on November 23, 1925, by Faber and Gwyer (later, Faber and Faber). That the poem is a composite is hardly debilitating, although its nature puts an especial burden on the commentator. The critic can do worse than to recall, abetted by a linguistic echo, what Eliot had written in the essay “The Metaphysical Poets,” first published in the Times Literary Supplement in October 1921 and then included in his Hogarth Essays volume Homage to John Dryden, printed and put out by the Woolfs in October 1924. There he proffered a perspective on the poet that has relevance to the reader of such works as Eliot’s (I quoted it earlier): it has to do with “amalgamating disparate experience,” connecting and even blending experiences that seem to “have nothing to do with each other.”9 The poem fits the description Eliot renders of familiar experience. The reader or critic, moreover, confronted with the five parts of which “The Hollow Men” is composed thus mimics the condition of the poet as Eliot represents him or her, confronted with “disparate experience.” Both poet and reader must amalgamate, for the experiences, “real world” and poetic alike, “are always forming new wholes.” Those wholes are made not by the reader or the observer; they exist prior to his or her coming on the scene.
Amalgamating the “disparate” parts of “The Hollow Men” is taxing at best, frustrating and discouraging at worst. The shifts in voice and tone are sometimes extreme, especially in the last-added fifth and final section, which begins with the children’s play-tune. Those differences are present, however, from the beginning.
The poem’s first section consists of three parts: two relatively long verse paragraphs, declarative and descriptive, surrounding two verses in the same register as lines in the fifth section. These are analytical, philosophical, sophisticated, the very opposite of child-like:
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralyzed force, gesture without motion[.]
Where they come from is not at all clear, but in any case they connect with the epigraph (“A penny for the Old Guy,” a reference to Guy Fawkes’s abortive effort to blow up Parliament in 1605), and they bear, as well, the feel of gravitas and with it of thematic significance.
The poem actually features, unusually, two epigraphs. The other, preceding one on a separate title page, has a quotation from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (“Mistah Kurtz—he dead”), followed by the year (1925). These are, themselves, “disparate.” Amalgamated, they point to action, on one hand, and on the other, the self-examination and -criticism that come with the clear-sighted recognition of one’s own “heart of darkness.” The link is suggestive, and thematically charged.
Alone, the allusion to Guy Fawkes establishes the theme of abortion that is hinted in the two-line philosophical statement I have quoted above and that plays out in the fifth section of the poem. These verses follow immediately the (italicized) words from the children’s song-game (that have been traced back to fertility dances).10 These verses all have to do with what comes between, interrupting, preventing, aborting: “the Shadow” falls between the “idea” and the “reality,” the “motion” and the “act,” the “conception” and the “creation,” the “emotion” and the “response,” the “desire” and the “spasm,” the “potency” and the “existence,” the “essence” and the “descent.” The lines bear a significant sexual charge, obviously, while moving toward the philosophical. Whatever “the Shadow” represents, the last lines carry a suggestion of Being and the “descent” that was the Incarnation. But these are only, to take the terms of Four Quartets, “hints and guesses.” I wish I could do more.
Regardless, the fifth section of “The Hollow Men” is replete with abortions. For the first and only time apparently, Eliot uses typography to create meaning. Here, the page is divided in two, with the game-song italicized and surrounding the “philosophical” statements and, at their close, these words: “For Thine is / Life is / For Thine is the.” The same abortion appears on the right side of the page in the italicized lines that themselves come between the stanzas of those statements: “For Thine is the Kingdom,” “Life is very long,” “For Thine is the Kingdom.” The middle fragment bears a different tone from that of the Lord’s Prayer. It stands as a whining lament coming between those words from the Prayer. With great appropriateness, “The Hollow Men” ends: “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.” Poem and world thus mirror one another—a point that Eliot will return to and exploit elsewhere: whining wins out, play over philosophy, but also, mitigating the events, children over adults. I take heart. There may be hope, then, after all.
In the waste land of this later poem, men are not only “hollow” but also “stuffed.” The last verses of the fourth section employ the different word “empty” in referring to “the perpetual star / Multifoliate rose”: “The hope only / Of empty men.” Other stars in the poem are always “fading,” else (once) “dying.” “Multifoliate rose” is a favorite idea of Eliot’s; it appears later in Ash-Wednesday and Four Quartets. Eliot could have taken the term from the German philosopher Leibniz, but in any case it sometimes refers to the Virgin Mary—that positive in-between figure, who figures so prominently in Ash-Wednesday, and it means both many-leaved and compound.
“The Hollow Men” opens on the first-person plural, perhaps implicating the reader in the condition. However that be, “I” occurs but once (although “me” occurs once as well): “Eyes I dare not meet in dreams / In death’s dream kingdom.” The location in the line of “Eyes” just before “I” alerts the reader to a possible connection greater than the identity of sound.
“Eyes,” in fact, figure as prominently in “The Hollow Men” as “I” does not. They appear threatening, as above. They are also said, differently, to be absent: “not here” where the stars are “dying.” Eyes join with those “stars,” for if the latter bring light, the former are the means by which it is perceived (and received).
Light—at least that provided by the sun, itself another star, of course—is also identified with “the eyes”: they become the light (of understanding). Those eyes that “I dare not meet in dreams” are absent. But “There, the eyes are / Sunlight on a broken column / There, is a tree swinging.” There are “voices” in the singing of the wind. At the same time, then, other things can serve to do the work of “the eyes,” other mediations appearing and functioning; these include “voices” (as with those that erupt from a text in the poem’s fifth section?).
The speaker is adamant, seeking to avoid “the eyes,” even to the point of adopting disguise, not yet whining but hardly willing or able to take meaningful action: he is insistent that he would “be no nearer.” At this point, the implications of the two (disparate) epigraphs appear “amalgamated”: meaningful action derives from and is dependent upon clear insight into motive, into one’s own darkness of heart. The speaker sounds a bit Prufrockian, more so like the wastelanders. He should have been, or would be, a scarecrow, hollow and stuffed, nonhuman, in any case. The “hollow men,” the “stuffed men,” are no other, then, than scarecrows.
The “eyes” they fear and avoid would reveal themselves to themselves, darkness and, but also be all possible potential for good, although Eliot does no more than hint at that, at best. The “hollow men” are, of course, without eyes, and they will remain so, according to the poem, “Sightless, unless / The eyes reappear,” and they would “reappear” as “the perpetual star / Multifoliate rose.” For that to happen, they have to become “empty,” shorn of all that with which they are now “stuffed,” a term that seems, here, exact as well as powerful.
As “hollow,” as distinguished from “empty,” the “hollow men” do carry possibility. Something may come, not necessarily to fill them, but to speak through them (they would then, presumably, have to be “empty,” rather than “stuffed”).
They might, in other words, themselves become a “medium.” Mere mention of the word recalls the great essay in The Sacred Wood, “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” There, as he deals with the relation of time and timelessness, the binaries of his title, and the anti-Montaignian, anti-Wordsworthian, anti-Romantic “surrender” of the poet’s “personality,” Eliot develops the notion of medium, by means of an analogy; it bears relevance and applicability for the reader as well as the poet (the Ancient here uses Modern science, complicating the opposition). He has hinted, he writes, in terms that anticipate those used, as we have seen, in “The Metaphysical Poets”:
by an analogy, that the mind of the mature poet differs from that of the immature one not precisely in any valuation of “personality,” not being necessarily more interesting or having “more to say,” but rather by being a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations.
The analogy was that of the catalyst. When the gases previously mentioned [i.e., “oxygen and sulphur dioxide”] are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected: has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet [and that of the reader, I suggest] is the shred of platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.11
I see here an analogy also with the Christian Trinity, Jesus Christ the medium (in more than one sense). In his conclusion, in any case, Eliot elaborates a few paragraphs later, well aware of how easily he can be—and has been—misunderstood and extending the implications in the direction I have gone.
The point of view which I am struggling to attack is perhaps related to the metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul: for my meaning is, that the poet has, not a “personality” to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry; and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality.12
In the world of The Waste Land, the idea of “medium” here adumbrated is not known and plays no role, although that world has its share and more of ghostly mediums, clairvoyants, fortune-tellers, and diviners (among whom we critics should strive not to be counted).
1 T.S. Eliot, Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1930).
2 T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1920), 33.
3 T.S. Eliot, Poems 1909–1925 (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1925).
4 Hugh Kenner, T.S. Eliot: The Invisible Poet (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1959), 194.
5 B.C. Southam, A Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot, 6th edn (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace, 1996), 261.
6 Qtd. in ibid.
7 Qtd. ibid., 201.
8 Ibid.
9 T.S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” Selected Essays, 3rd edn (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 287.
10 Southam, Guide to the Selected Poems, 215.
11 T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” The Sacred Wood, 48.
12 Ibid., 50–51.