Hollow Men Essay

884 Words4 Pages
T.S. Eliot was a very popular poet in his time and is still widely read today. One of his most famous poems, “The Hollow Man”, even won a Nobel Prize. The poem talks about the emptiness that exists inside every person, no matter who they are. Eliot brings up “death’s dream kingdom,” which also ties into the idea of emptiness inside everyone. Eliot uses the image of time as well to show that in the poem someone is dying, which leads him to ask if when you’re about to die, do you dream of the emptiness you had in life, or the things that you missed? Eliot shows this by talking about resurrection, the image of straw in someone’s head, and death it self. The scarecrow is a figure that represents solitude, a man made of straw that stands in the open world, alone, instead of living a life with others. Eliot talks about a person’s head filled with straw instead of a brain, which doesn’t allow them to think. In lines 1-4 he says “We are the hollow men, We are the stuffed men, Learning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!” to contract the reader’s ideas that heads are filled with ideas and imagination and intellectual thoughts. Yet these ideas and thoughts that exist inside people’s minds are of no use, because brains can’t plan out what they really want to happen in life. Though people can think freely they cannot predict what life may bring, and having no control of this it leaves the “Hollow men” as if they were in a state of emptiness. People can be smart, but in the end their intellect doesn’t matter, and their heads might as well be “filled with straw.” Eliot also conveys the message of emptiness in line 11 when he mentions, “Shape without form, Shade without color,” because in life people only judge the outside appearance of a person. Yet the hollow man has nothing to be judged by, without real shape or form, and without something to be judged by the hollow
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