Mistah Kurtz-he dead.
                    A penny for the Old Guy

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw.  Alas!
Our dried voices, when                             5
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar                                 10
Shape without form shade without colour, 
Paralyzed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes to death's other Kingdom 
Remember us--if at all-- not as lost              15
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

                    II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom                          20
These do not appear:
There the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There is a tree swinging

THE HOLLOW MEN: On the situation and the atmosphere, cf.  Dante's account
(lnferno, III) of Hell's entrance where dwell in "the starless air," in
"air forever dark," and "without hope of death," those "who never were
alive"--"the wretched souls of those who lived without infamy and without
praise" because they were not positive enough spiritually to be either
good or evil. 

Epigraphs: Mistah Kurtz he dead: In Conrad's Heart of Darkness, this is
the phrase used by the black cabin boy announcing Mr. Kurtz's death.  Mr.
Kurtz, a European trader, had gone into "the heart of darkness" the
mysterious primitive life of the African jungle with high intentions, but
was soon barbarized by it: "The wilderness ... found him out early. ... I
think it whisper to him things about himself which he did not know--and
the whisper ... proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within
him because he was hollow at the core." Despite his hollowness, however,
as Marlowe the narrator of the story insists, Mr. Kurtz had been "a
remarkable man."  His dying whisper, "The horror!  The horror" showed at
least "some sort of belief: it had candour, it had conviction, it had a
vibrating note of revolt ..., it had the appalling face of a glimpsed
truth." A Penny for the Old Guy: The cry of English children on Guy Fawkes
day, as they go about with straw effigies of the seventeenth-century
traitor Guy Fawkes--later to be hung and burned--and ask for pennies with
which to buy fireworks.  But it is we who are the real hollow men, the
poem hints- -not the lost violent souls like Fawkes (or even Kurtz).

13-14. Those... Kingdom: i.e., those who stood for something positive,
either evil or good, and so can really die, as the hollow men cannot.  19.
Eyes: In the Purgatorio, xxx and xxxi, Beatrice's eyes are a symbol of
spiritual reality--on which account Dante both longs and dreads to behold
them.  Among the hollow men, in Limbo, there is no such challenge. All
phenomena are naturalistic. 


And voices are       		                  25
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star
Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom                          30
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves                      35
No nearer--

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom.

                    III

This is the dead land
this is cactus land                               40
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this                                   45
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss                              50
Form prayers to broken stone

                         IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eye here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley                             55
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms.        

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river.        60

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom                       65
The hope only
Of empty men.

28. Star: a symbol embracing both the world of naturalistic flux (cf. l.
54) and the world of eternal spirit (cf. l. 63) 

33-35. crossed ... behaves: i.e., effigies, scarecrows, tossing in the
wind. 

37. that ... meeting: i.e., with the searching eyes of spiritual
reality. 

60. the ... river: The river Acheron in Dante's Inferno, on the
far side of which is Hell. 64. multifoliate rose: Cf. Dante's Celestial
Rose made of light, Paradiso, XXX 116--"how vast is the spread of this
rose in its outermost leaves."  The rose is traditionally Christ's emblem
(and the Virgin's). 


                    V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear            70
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act                                  75
Falls the Shadow
          For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion                          80
And the response
Falls the Shadow
               Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm                                85
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow                             90
               For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For thine is the

This is the way the way the world ends       95
This is the way the way the world ends                
This is the way the way the world ends                
Not with a bang but a whimper.


68. Eliot's variant (cf. the cactus land, 39ff.) of the nursery rhyme,
"Here we go round the mulberry bush." 

74-75. Cf Julius Caesar, II i 63 ff.: 
          "Between the acting of a dreadful thing
               And the first motion, all the interim is
          Like a phantasma or a hideous dream."

76. Falls .. Shadow: Cf. Ernest Dowson's Cynara:
          "Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine
          There fell thy shadow, Cynara!"

98. bang: relevant to the fireworks of Guy Fawkes day: the violence that
Fawkes planned (blowing up the House of Parliament); and the positiveness
of soul, even if evil, that the hollow men long for.