Source of book: I own this
Like many people of my age, I read “The Hollow Men” first in high school. I also, if I recall, read “The Waste Land” around the same time. For whatever reason, it didn’t speak to me quite the way the first poem did.
I have read them since, although I haven’t blogged about them. I decided to revisit both poems, and add another that follows it in sequence in my particular hardback, “Ash-Wednesday.” Although each is different, I feel they are linked in Eliot’s grappling with the aftermath of World War One, and his turn toward a more religious-mystical writing style.
One can draw a straight line between these poems in sequence through to the Four Quartets, which are, in my view, some of the finest poems ever written.
I still consider “The Hollow Men” the best of this trio, but I found much to love in the other two.
The Waste Land
This poem is packed full of literary and historical references, and takes some unpacking. Eliot himself left a bunch of notes, which are reproduced in my edition. It also is very modernist, with a free form, changes in perspective, fragmented narratives, varying styles, and a broad scope.
Generally, it expresses the feeling that World War One shattered the world that had existed, leaving behind a moral and spiritual vacuum, shattered lives, and a lack of meaning.
Because of the fragmentation, it is a bit tough to follow, and I re-read portions several times. Despite the fact that this poem is often considered Eliot’s best, I found it the weakest of the three, mostly because of a lack of coherence. The episodes seem disjointed and not always related to the others.
This isn’t to say it isn’t good. It is a very good poem. Just not (to me at least) as compelling as the other two.
There are some amazing lines, though. For example, the opening of the poem, with its unforgettable upending of the usual promise of spring.
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
One of the interesting choices Eliot makes is in the placement of the “-ing” verbs at the end of the line, blurring the boundary between the words’ use as verbs and as gerunds.
The overall picture, which Eliot fleshes out more in what follows, is that winter kept everything hidden, forgotten, but the thaw revealed the emptiness - the dead bodies, the death, the horror of war.
I was reminded a bit of Kazuo Ishiguro’s book, The Buried Giant.
Later in this section, the author envisions the ghosts of the dead walking around London.
Unreal city,
Under a brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Another line in a later section echoes this thought.
I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.
And again, in a brief section entitled “Death by Water”:
Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
Definitely some beautiful writing in this poem, one worth revisiting.
The Hollow Men
This poem is amazing in so many ways. And it has always seemed relevant to me. Our world is full of hollow men, stuffed men, with no substance beyond a lust for money and power. Trump is perhaps the best example - and we all knew it back in the 1980s and 90s, before the white Evangelicals who raised me forgot all about what they told kids like me about how Trump was the sort of evil vapid monster you became an atheist.
(In retrospect, of course, they were wrong about atheism - in reality, atheists are, statistically speaking, more moral and empathetic than Evangelicals. Trump is and was evil not because of his lack of a belief in a god, but because he is a malignant narcissist who grew up rich and has never had to care about other people in his entire goddamn life.)
Re-reading “The Hollow Men” for what has to be a dozen times sure feels like reading a description of MAGA and the emptiness that is left when you sell your soul for political power. It is a death within life, a spiritual dementia.
I could easily quote the entire poem, but I’ll just hit the highlights.
The opening, of course.
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without color
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
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
There are images introduced here which recur throughout the poem: eyes, and the kingdom of the dead.
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
And this:
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.
As the poem speeds toward its end, as the wheels seem to come off, Eliot gives new lyrics to the old nursery rhyme, “Here we go ‘round the mulberry bush,” first with the desert imagery of a prickly pear, and finally one of the bleakest yet most memorable endings ever written.
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.
Ash-Wednesday
I will admit, I hadn’t read this poem before. It is a gem as well, and one I think I will need to return to.
I was raised non-denominational Evangelical - a very American sort of religion, honestly - and never really did the liturgy or the religious calendar. That stuff was popish idolatry or something, I guess.
Still, I learned parts of the liturgy as the result of being a classical musician. And I learned about the events on the Catholic/Episcopal calendar from from friends from other traditions, particularly as an adult.
I have not myself celebrated Ash Wednesday, but I do find the idea of a season of repentance and reflection to be a beautiful thing.
Eliot wrote this poem around 1927 (it was published in 1930), during the process of his conversion to the Anglican faith. As such, it is filled with religious ideas, and documents a sort of process wherein an atheist (like Eliot was) finds faith. It’s…complicated.
For me, as a person raised in a faith tradition, but who was forced out because I spoke out against the new messiah (the orange one…), and who has subsequently come to understand the way white supremacy and misogyny are inseparable from that tradition, poems like this touch a cord. I won’t say I am exactly deconverted, but I’m also not not deconverted. Religion is complicated for me.
Conversion narratives may feel like the opposite direction, but they also live in that liminal space where I think true faith resides. The region of doubt, of questioning, of seeking truth wherever that path leads.
I also find that Eliot’s writings on faith feel genuine, and also hard-won. This isn’t the cheap or inherited faith, but a true resonance of the soul.
The poem starts with a quote from Calvalcanti, a friend of Dante, in a poem about dying, and builds from there into a renunciation of the values of the world and a look toward the possibility of salvation.
Several lines stood out to me, including the beginning.
Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope
I no longer strive to strive toward such things
(Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of that usual reign?
Honestly, the first section is so good with the music and rhythm of the words that I read it over again for the beauty.
The second section addresses the Virgin Mary, and includes a poem-within-the-poem with lines half as long as the main body. It is worth quoting.
Lady of silences
Calm and distressed
Torn and most whole
Rose of memory
Rose of forgetfulness
Exhausted and life-giving
Worried reposeful
The single Rose
Is now the garden
Where all loves end
Terminate torment
Of love unsatisfied
The greater torment
Of love satisfied
End of the endless
Journey to no end
Conclusion of all that
Is inconclusible
Speech without word and
Word of no speech
Grace to the Mother
For the Garden
Where all love ends.
Paradox is so central both to poetry and to spirituality.
The third section has a lot of repetition, as it describes the journey - and the struggle - in terms of a spiral staircase. Many of the words are repeated, giving a sense of the repetition of steps, of the turning back on itself.
Here is an example:
At the first turning of the second stair
I turned and saw below
The same shape twisted on the baninster
Under the vapour of the fetid air
Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears
The deceitful face of hope and despair.
Later, as the monsters give way to sweeter visions, that motif of “hope and despair” is transformed.
Fading, fading; strength beyond hope and despair
Climbing the third stair.
The fourth section has this beautiful passage:
Here are the years that walk between, bearing
Away the fiddles and the flutes, restoring
One who moves in the time between sleep and waking, wearing
White light folded, sheathed about her, folded.
Again, the similar use of “-ing” verbs as in “The Waste Land.”
The opening of the fifth section is amazing for its use of alliteration and repetition.
If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the center of the silent Word.
Those of us raised in the Christian tradition will recognize the opening of the Gospel of John there. But Eliot transforms and reimagines it.
The final part parallels the first, references the middle sections, and ultimately sees the “turning” not as death or loss, but rebirth, and flight.
Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn
Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings.
I found this poem to be unexpectedly beautiful, and felt fitting for the time of life and complexity I am in. All three of these poems were excellent, and reminded me again of why I love Eliot.
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