The Hollow Men

The subtractive test finds very little to take. A poem that names its condition as “Paralysed force, gesture without motion” cannot carry slack, and almost none of it does. The five parts are a sequence of decreasing capacity: a chorus that can still describe itself, a single voice that can still fear and hide, a land of stone images where a kiss becomes a prayer to broken stone, a gathering by a river where sight itself has gone, and a last part where speech breaks. Each does what only it can. What holds the axis is the poem’s origin as an assembly: the third part, carried over from earlier fragments, is the slightest of the five and shares the work of the second, and the poem would lose least without it.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: there is a condition worse than damnation, the condition of those who never acted at all, in whom the will has been cut from the deed, and a civilisation can arrive at it together. The last part states it in its own terms: “Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act / Falls the Shadow”. That is a diagnosis of acedia, the gap between conception and creation, desire and fulfilment, given a name; and the chorus makes it social, not private. Held at this figure because a large share of what the poem gives is atmosphere, the dry cellar, the cactus land, the dying stars, and because it names the condition more than it shows its causes: the war and the lost faith are under the poem, never in it.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Elevation here is of a deliberate and paradoxical kind: the poem’s grandeur is the grandeur of diminishment, and its summit is a whimper. Within that mode it rises often for so short a work: the opening chorus, hollow and stuffed, with “rats’ feet over broken glass”; the Dantean distance of “Those who have crossed / With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom”; the “Multifoliate rose” of the fourth part, the one image of glory in the poem; the Lord’s Prayer that cannot be completed; and the ending, the most famous anticlimax in English verse. Held at this figure because the elevation is mostly dread and cold, the design forbids sustained lift or variety, and the one warm height, the rose, is kept at arm’s length on purpose.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The particular is a guy, the straw effigy children wheel through English streets in November, and the poem makes it the figure of an age: “We are the stuffed men”. That is myth built, not evoked: the effigy is load-bearing, carried into the scarecrow disguise of the second part, “Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves”, and into the stuffed heads of the first. The second structure is Dante’s: the hollow men stand where his neutrals stand, outside Hell’s gate, and gather by a “tumid river” that is, on the common reading, Acheron; the rose is the rose of the Paradiso. Conrad’s Kurtz is set over the whole. What holds the axis is that the frame is assembled from allusions as much as built into an action: the poem has no journey, only a waiting, and its sources sit beside one another rather than fusing.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The inheritance is Eliot’s own: The Waste Land, three years before, had already made the poem of fragments, voices, allusion and a broken liturgy. This poem departs from it in two ways. It narrows the many voices to one choral “we” and strips the line almost bare, to a near-childish incantation; and it brings a nursery rhyme, “Here we go round the prickly pear”, and the Lord’s Prayer into one group of stanzas, so that the last part is a game and a liturgy that both fail. That is a real turn, and it points the way to Ash-Wednesday. The stake was real but bounded: so spare a poem from the most watched poet in English risked being read as exhaustion. What holds the axis is that the method and the idiom were his own and already proven; the wager was placed on a known path, narrowed.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Change the form and the poem stops knowing what it knows. Its subject is the failure of speech, will and prayer, and the form fails in the same places. The lines shrink as the poem goes on; the incantation of the last part repeats because nothing can advance; the prayer begins and breaks off before its noun, and the breaking is the knowledge, a soul that cannot reach the word. The three stanzas of the Shadow are built as the gap they name: two terms, then the Shadow, set in a different margin. The ending takes the form of a nursery rhyme and puts the end of the world into it, so that a children’s game is the measure of apocalypse. Prose would explain the hollowness; this form enacts it. Held a little off the top because the second to fourth parts use a lyric form Eliot could have used elsewhere.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Evidence first: a century of reading, teaching and commentary, and the questions stay open. Who are the “we”: the generation after the war, the modern secular mind, Dante’s neutrals, or the speaker and his reader? Are those who crossed with direct eyes the saved, or the damned who at least chose? Is the rose a hope offered or a hope mocked? Is the whimper the poem’s verdict or its last confession? The poem also yields as a hinge in Eliot’s course, read back to The Waste Land and forward to his conversion of 1927 and Ash-Wednesday. Held at this figure because a short poem, however dense, has been more thoroughly worked than the larger ones: its sources are long since identified, and much of the return is to the same few cruxes rather than to new ground.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The field is poetry in English of the 1920s and after. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the poem showed that the fragmentary method of The Waste Land could be contracted almost to silence, and that liturgy, nursery rhyme and Dante could be set in the same short lines as one incantation; it gave the generation after the war its most exact name for its condition. That widened a manner more than it reorganised a form. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the closing lines are among the most quoted in English poetry; the phrase “hollow men” passed into the language; the poem is quoted across later literature, music and film, best known in Kurtz’s reading of it in Apocalypse Now (1979). Its reach in poetry is hard to separate from The Waste Land’s, and much of the reach is of a phrase, not of the poem’s art.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over about a century. Form: the text survives whole as Eliot fixed it in 1925, with nothing lost and no textual crux of substance; the earlier magazine states are known, and add nothing and cost nothing. Presence is continuous since publication: in the anthologies of modern English poetry, taught at school and university across the English-speaking world, translated widely, and quoted far beyond any readership of poetry. That presence is near the widest a century can show, but part of it is the fame of two lines rather than reading of the poem, and fame is presence, not proof. Fabric carries no charge: nothing in the surface is fixed to a technology or a topical satire, and the Guy Fawkes custom the poem draws on is still kept.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Judged on Eliot’s English, with nothing between. The command is of the short line and the incantatory repetition, and it is exact. The sound carries the meaning: the dry sibilants and hard stops of “rats’ feet over broken glass”; the chiastic doubling of “Shape without form, shade without colour”; the Shadow falling into its own margin; the slackening of “Life is very long” between the strict stanzas; the line “This is the way the world ends” said three times before the turn to “Not with a bang but a whimper”, which drops the rhythm on its last word. The allusions are worked in at the level of the line, not attached. Held below the top on two charges: the third and fourth parts are less pressed than the others, with images such as “this valley of dying stars” close to the stock of the period; and in so narrowed a poem the range of instruments is small.

Score: 8.9 / 10

One law governs the whole: these are men who neither acted nor were damned, and everything in the poem obeys that suspension. Take the two most distant elements: the nursery rhyme “Here we go round the prickly pear” and the “Multifoliate rose” of the Paradiso. They obey the same law: the children’s ring goes round and round without arriving, and the heavenly rose is seen only as the hope of empty men. The eyes that will not be met, the kingdom that cannot be named, the prayer that cannot be finished, the world that ends without an act: one physics from the first line to the last, and the assembly from separate fragments leaves no visible seam in the law. Held at this figure because the range is narrow, one mood, one voice, one condition, and narrowness is not coherence.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Judged on what a single short poem holds; a low mark on a small form describes the form. Consciousness, fully, in its paralysis. The sacred, in the prayer, the rose and death’s kingdoms. The communal, in the chorus of “we”. History by implication: the condition after the war, and the end of the world as the poem’s last subject. Death and what lies past it, in the Dantean frame. Childhood and custom, in the guy and the nursery rhyme. They are integrated, joined by the one condition of hollowness. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve, near its own floor, is the count and the mode: labour, the family, the state, the natural order and the body are absent or glimpsed only as landscape, and history is never present as event, only as the mood it left.

Score: 6.8 / 10