T.S. Elliot's the Hollow Men and the Treaty of Versailles

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This poem by T.S. Elliot can be used to analyse the Treaty of Versailles. Mistah Kurtz—he dead. 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 No nearer— Not that final meeting In the twilight kingdom Is it like this In death’s other kingdom Waking alone At the hour when we are Trembling with tenderness Lips that would kiss Form prayers to broken stone. In this last of meeting places We grope together And avoid speech Gathered on this beach of the tumid river Here we go round the prickly pear Prickly pear prickly pear Here we go round the prickly pear At five o’clock in the morning. 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. Simply, I would use this poem to describe the end of the war and the Treaty of Versailles. I believe this poem can be used in three ways: firstly to describe the state of the people in the post-war world, secondly to describe the complete destruction of ww1, and finally to talk about the Treaty of Versailles and what this all meant for the future. First of all, it is important to note in this poem that all of the beings are damned due to some sort of sinning they have done. The straw dummies suffer both physically and spiritually. J. Hillis Miller believed that The Hollow Men showed where idealism leads – the poem takes place in a twilight realm of disembodied men and forces. The hollow men are walking corpses – and their emptiness is the vacuity of pure mind detached from any reality. Their voices are whispers, “quiet and meaningless”. They are detached from nature and live in a place devoid of any spiritual presence. What T. S.

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