Understanding "The Hollow Men" by T. S. Eliot

[Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] hi before we get started on my lecture I'm gonna ask you to get a good fair copy of TS Eliot's poem The Hollow Men print it out and there in front of you so that you can easily follow the observations I'm going to make in my lecture now this lecture is going to attempt to shed light on the poem through a reading of Joseph Conrad's heart of darkness and we know that TS Eliot wanted to make his poem an homage to the novella heart of darkness because of the epigraph at the very beginning wherein a native comes up to Marlow and says mr. Kurtz he dead and this epigraph comes before the first stanza of the poem so with that in mind let's go ahead and see how we can make connections not only to Conrad's novella but also to some of the things we discovered in heart of darkness which I talked about in parts 1 and 2 of my lecture series of this unit hope you enjoy it so Marlowe listens at great length to this brick maker who tells him a lot about who Kurtz is he starts to hear a lot of details he says in the previous page that he was a quote emissary of pity and science and progress and the devil knows what else we we want for the guidance of the cause entrusted to us by Europe so to speak higher intelligence wide sympathies a singleness of purpose please saying all this stuff and it goes on for a long paragraph and at the end is in the bottom of your page 95 Marlow says I let him run on this paper maché mephistopheles mephistopheles an allusion to Faust the the devil and the Goethe the Faust story and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt maybe he don't you see had been to be assistant manager and by-and-by under the present man and I could see that the coming of Kurtz had upset them both not a little so this this is a kind of an image of a hollow man a paper mache devil that you could poke a hole into with your forefinger that no TS Eliot actually begins his poem with this as the first epigram which to me is solid evidence that he's making a connection between this text and that text of the heart of darkness okay so at that point then we can start using perhaps we can use the poem that Eliot gave us in the 20th century to be kind of a gloss or an explication of maybe give us some insight on a better ways to understand what's going on in the novel so which came first the novella okay so about twenty years later so TS Eliot published The Hollow Men one of his most famous poems a penny for the old guy would be a reference to the Gunpowder Plot and in on November 5th 1605 a group of conspirators by a disgruntled number of parliamentarians in England were rolling kegs of black powder underneath the Parliament where King James the first was going to speak and they were going to assassinate him they got discovered and their ringleader was a guy named Guy Fawkes and this is a an event that actually prompted Shakespeare to write Macbeth is kind of an homage to King James who was Shakespeare's sponsor and Shakespeare's company was the King's Men and play of course is about some of the bad things that can happen when you assassinate a king so King James survives they caught mr. Fox and his friends we'll talk about that more in a minute if we go to the very beginning of the true beginning of all creation in Genesis these are the very first three verses of the Bible the Christian Bible Genesis in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth now the earth was formless and empty darkness was over the surface of the deep and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters and God said let there be light and there was light God saw God saw that light was good and something happens the rest of my slide but so forth so what we see in the poem of course is kind of the antithesis of this right we see the light is only maybe kind of reflecting on broken columns we see eyes that the speaker doesn't want to see that the speaker wants to not meet in dreams we see the star fading away so if in the beginning for a Christian like Eliot was that the beginning is bringing together all the formlessness and the chaos and the darkness and from that making light and order and you can associate everything you want to with that truth good versus its opposite darkness the unknown chaos lies evil so the the true beginning of creation in the creation story in Genesis is is the coming of light right so question I think the poem raises is could it be that we are headed back to that formless darkness and to what extent is all the knowledge we're gaining actually not helping us to get more light but actually pushing us farther back into the dark formlessness okay and this is one of the theories I'm gonna put forth about the poem so again the the first epigraph establishing this connection between the novella the bonfire night so what happened in England their version of it's kind of like a Halloween kind of thing where the kids would go around and knock on doors and they'd say a penny for the old guy and you know I mean a penny was worth more a hundred years ago than it is today so they instead of getting like candy like you know our kids get when they trick-or-treated they were going around for pennies and they would the kids that would push around like a stroller with effigy of Guy Fawkes so they would take you know like old clothes and stuff it with hay to create like a dummy so of course in this effigy would be stuffed so an apt epigraph for for the poem of course which is the hollow min the stuffed min and the poor as the poem starts We Are The Hollow Men we are the stuffed min so there's this emphatic kind of repetition and notice that at the end of section one it's repeated again we are the Holliman we're the stuff men as the hollom in the stuffed men so we've learned in this class that when things were repeated like that they're emphasized so the speaker is one of these hollow men right notice the speaker is identifying as one of them so as you're reading this who did you think the speaker was no based on what was here in the rest of the poem okay think about in your mind who the Holliman might represent and then there's a motif in this first section of dryness lifelessness bloodless and sterility baroness headpiece filled with straw our dried voices when we whispered together are quiet and meaningless so there's a sense of inertness and the again the speaker is part of this chorus of voices that even when they speak value or meaning a lack of fertility kind of seems to me kind of evoked there as well wind and dry grass and then there's this middle part of section one where we have these oxymorons shape without form shade without color paralyzed force so this pile up of oxymorons seeming hard to kind of indicate passivity the opposite of agency or action I mean how do you how do you make a gesture without motion a lot of critics note that in section one there's the allusion to Dante's Inferno in the beginning of the inferno where in the the Damned occupy this area called Nimbo before they actually start going down into the circles of hell and this would be crossing over the River Styx so there's people how many of you read Dante okay so you may be in tenth grade so the the sinners there are on the banks of the Styx waiting to be ferried across by a Charon right and so we have an allusion to that yeah in that beginning of the inferno we have Virgil saying to Dante that these centers have no hope of death and they're blind life is so abject that they're envious of every other law so the illusion here would be fitting since blindness is one of the motifs of the poem as well oh here we go it's just the slide I was looking for so you can see the image of Charon with the sinners waiting to be piloted across the river and to help okay and we're not really told what deaths other kingdom or deaths dream kingdom are and then we have as we get into this part two we have some imagery sunlight on a broken column which for me kind of evoked ancient ruins I really loved this that image of sunlight on the broken column it almost seems to me kind of like a post-apocalyptic image the world after everything's kind of broken down are ruins the result of civilization and progress is that the end result ruins that where everything ends up it kind of had one of you your groups came up and did Ozymandias who did Ozymandias so it kind of this part of the poem kind of reminds me of that poem that we read in class where the speaker talks about this great and powerful feral statue just in the dust and then we have these voices singing that seemed at a remove from the hollow man so the hollow man hear these voices what are they and then we also have some kind of opposite imagery here there's a tree swinging voices singing so these voices are not quiet like the voice of the hollow man and the Emam the tree swinging seems to indicate something that's in motion and something that's alive and then he says these things are more distant more solemn than a fading star rivers between the living and the dead between besides just the allusion to Dante of course in heart of darkness there's the river of the the congo river going up to Kurtz if you've read or watched Apocalypse Now they're going up the Nunn River which is actually not a real River but that's a fictional River in there as well and the speaker the highs that I dare not meet in dreams in deaths Kingdom it seems to me that recognized wants to remain kind of cloaked what happened with TS Eliot I told you is a Christian poet but then this thing happened in the 1920s where Einstein started publishing his new physical models and Einstein Ian's physics contains some notions about what happens with stars and gravity and time and space that began to kind of chip away at the notions for order the the biblical notions for order that someone like Eliot would have had so there's this at this point there becomes in the poem I think kind of an intersection between the religious and the scientific so as he starts talking about a fading star he's talking about entropy right which is we now know that what happens to stars is the helium as its burned off into hydrogen the store of fuel eventually it's finite you know like our Sun is going to burn out someday and eventually as enough mass is burned away into the energy thus the size of the star will expand into what's called a red giant and it'll eventually just kind of and what's left is this kind of light pinpoint of of its former self and the star that remains it's just kind of fading away gradually until it's gone and that'll eventually happened to every last star right in the universe that's that's modern astrophysics this would have bothered someone like TS Eliot but in it he found a metaphor for this concept of entropy and entropy is the it's a scientific concept that things eventually unwind just like if you take a top and start a top spinning on a surface eventually the top will run out of energy just two it's the entropy of the energy being spent and it will eventually fall over okay and that all things that are activated through energy in creation are eventually going to experience this entropy so think of it as a form of cosmic death right and well I think this poem does is it takes this concept of entropy and applies it not just to astrophysics and the material world and creation but also I think looks at our civilization and our society and do we face a kind of more entropy and the the irony for me that I think Eliot's putting forth in the palms that the more we learn the more we kind of become morally less stable and break down Wally societally so you guys will have to be the judge if that's actually happening but it's an interesting idea so and Elliott this new Einsteinian physics was he was concerned about how what effect creationism and Christian cosmology and all of that so moving on this is something that a critic that I cited in the earlier slide oops I can post this for you Catherine Ebury great article I found on Elliott's cosmology and she writes quote the dying star scape of Eliot's poem is largely influenced by earlier astronomy particularly the Victorian notion of entropy is proposed by kelvins second law of thermodynamics get very scientific here which suggested that the universe as a physical system is continually running down so a form of heat death okay so now we begin I'm going to skip this slide ok so here's here's a picture I found on a Wikipedia page on the theory of relativity which shows how Einstein theory posited space-time connectivity and of course this idea that something the larger the mass of a as of an object out there in the cosmos the larger its mass the more it will warp the fabric of space and time so things then become relative because of that warpage which is I think interesting for our poet because it's it's indicative of a world where then things are unstable and one thing you maybe notice with the poem is that it seems to be kind of fragmentary did you notice that not only in style but in terms of syntax and in terms of meaning and the hollow man is a really good example of what we call a modernist poem which is where the meanings are fragmentary and the style is also sometimes fragmentary you see a good example that at the very end of the poem okay so the imagery and the diction of the poem evokes fragmentation emptiness a fear of being seen for what one is through parts one and two okay let me we're deliberate disguises rats coat crows skin cross staves in a field behaving as the wind behaves so the speaker again it's one of these hollow men is well is passive just like a scarecrow in a field maybe there's a wish to escape from this world where entropy is happening so let's go into the next part of the poem so the stone images in part 3 again kind of evoke the idea of a ruined civilization that's exhausted its resources I posted the slide of Easter Island because if you know anything about Easter Island it actually used to have forests and the people that live there used the Timbers to transport and and move these giant stone edifice and of course they burn them for fuel etc but eventually they denuded their whole island of their trees and their civilization died off and disappeared the island can no longer sustain it the speaker says here they receive the stone images receive the supplicate of a dead man's hand under the twinkle of a fading star it's this idea of a dead man praying to some kind of dead image made out of stone what would Holloman pray for maybe for some substance I don't know but the hope seems to be evaporating because the star is fading it's a it's a twinkling star it's a fading star so any greatness that's been there think back to the poem Ozymandias that was shared you know any greatness is now in the past far in the past it has not lasted through the ages right interesting point about this poem the poem is 420 light 420 words long and it only uses a hundred and eighty words so kind of a not a whole lot of progression a lot of the words repeated and the poem in a way I think you can say exhausts its store of words so and again this image of a dying Sun I I would direct you back to the very beginning of the novella which is on the second page of the story Marlow says and at last in its curved and imperceptible fall the Sun sank low and from glowing white changed to a dull red without Ray's and without heat as if about to go out suddenly stricken to death by the touch of that gloom brooding over a crowd of men and it to me if you just take that passage out of hundred of darkness you get I think a lot of where TS Eliot got this poem you know he just takes this idea of us a giant red Sun which it to me evokes the the supernovae of a star about to blow itself up because it loses its gravity so as he finishes part 2 part 3 he says is this like it is is it like this in deaths leather kingdom waking alone at the hour when we are trembling with tenderness so we have these images of prayers two broken stone these making ruined ideals kind of putting them on a pedestal and we don't see any kind of remaining humanity okay lips that would kiss other people no lips that would kiss form prayers two broken stones so think of like the opportunities any any humanity these people could have had this is miss they're not taking their lips and kissing a person they're praying prayers to a piece of stone something that's inert okay let's move on okay so then there's in part four as we get closer to the end here the Hollow Men find themselves in this valley of stars which is a sort of limbo without the eyes there are no eyes here earlier in the poem the speaker did not want to be seen by the eye so here there are no eyes maybe he's gone deeper into hell and the valley itself is hollow his in this hollow Valley so just like the hollow man the valley self is Hollow the idea of a broken jaw would indicate something that can't utter anything something again another image of inertness a jaw that can't speak because it's broken right our lost kingdoms here's an image from the film Apocalypse Now which to me is what I visualized when I read this part of the poem that's where Colonel Willard gets up to the to the headwaters of the river and actually gets to where Kurtz's compound is it's like this last of meeting places there's really nothing beyond it we grope together and avoid speech and I thought they did a great job of that in Apocalypse Now a lot of you have seen it in past weeks when a when Willard gets there you know he's he's there's this kind of manic photojournalists who's talking to him leading him around the compound but no one else there saying anything they're all just kind of quiet gathered there so think about what this might represent this kind of again this idea you could say the Tumen River could be another image of the River Styx from Dante speaking of Dante the second or the third stanza here in part four the hollow man says sightless unless the eyes reappears the perpetual star multi foliat rows of deaths Twilight Kingdom the hope only of empty men so in Dante in the Paradiso which is the third volume of Dante's Divine Comedy from canto 31 for those of you taking notes you can read this he describes the heavenly host when the Dante the pilgrim gets into paradise and sees all the angels they're all swirling around in this like giant kind of spiral graph of light and he describes them as a rose he uses a simile in their in fashion as a snow white rose lay then before my view the saintly multitude which in his own blood Christ espoused meanwhile that other hosts that soar aloft to gaze and celebrate his glory whom they loved hovered around and like a troop of bees amid the vernal Suites alighting now now clustering where their fragrant labor grows flew downward to the mighty flower or rose from the redundant petals streaming back unto the steadfast dwelling of their joy so here this the speaker says sightless unless the eyes reappear as the perpetual star of deaths the multi foliot Rose of the deaths Twilight Kingdom so to me this is an image of divine order that we see in Dante that the speaker is kind of about looting here to this image of this perfect kind of arrangement of angel see these I don't know if you can see in the slide from where you're seeing that these are angels multitudes of angels that make like this white rose that pilgrim sees and it's this image of divine love and order and eternity because it just kind of goes on forever and the faithful have continual life assured within that rose it's like an assurance but for the speaker the hollow man and the poem is this something that's going to happen for them say the hope only of empty men so that's our very pessimistic it's a vain kind of futile hope and then we also of course are going to be talking about the shadow here as we get into part five this is an image on the slide of Apocalypse Now of Colonel Kurtz who's depicted in shadows mostly in the film think of a shadow as a place where light is extinguished it's a place of things that are hidden okay much like the motives of the Hollow Men and if you've watched my other videos I'm not gonna go into detail on that and this this lecture but in my other videos I went into some length about the motives of those who got us into the Vietnam War the war in Vietnam which was based on what was based on an event called the Tonkin Gulf and there was a resolution that came out of that that led into a huge escalation of military military adventure there in Vietnam and what you guys learn in your classes about Tonkin Gulf it didn't happen right it was bogus so the whole Vietnam War was based on this one thing I mean that's an oversimplification I mean there are other layers of causality but the trigger for up being the military venture there was this Tonkin Gulf Resolution which was was a lie right and if you watch my other video I talked about Iraq and our 2003 invasion of Iraq which was based on what WMDs right and the weapons of mass destruction ended up being there no so then it became about let's well let's liberate these people and bring them democracy you know and it's like straight out of a chapter from a heart of darkness okay we're gonna be emissaries of light and when we invaded Iraq and there were they couldn't find the weapons of mass destruction President Bush went on national TV and said we are now calling this Operation Iraqi Freedom so instead of being an operation to stop spread of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction now we're now we're there no no it wasn't that now we're there to bring these people freedom you know let alone that we're not going to all the other places on the world where there's not freedom like North Korea and you know now we're gonna go to this place and bring them freedom and of course we all know how that turned out right but so there's this question about motives coming from these Hollow men who have been taking us into these ventures and I think for Conrad it was you know the you know King Leopold and his Belgian Congo same kind of dynamic at work you know that's let's bring these people God and civilization these these savage these animals you know and and let's fix them that's that's a stated purpose of course but it's not real right so think of the shadows maybe representing that you know a prickly pear that here we go around the prickly pear a prickly pears a type of cactus so it's a kind of popular name for a type of cactus called an o puntilla and the the verse there at the beginning of verse five is actually from a nursery rhyme about the mulberry bush here we go round the mulberry bush okay and then he he's going to finish with getting into the Lord's Prayer we see this start at the second stanza part five he says between the idea and the reality between the motion and the act of Falls the shadow think of the shadow as a force of entropy something that extinguishes light maybe he's thinking of another distant possible world when he says for thine is the kingdom why is this part in italics its quoting trying to quote the Lord's Prayer unsuccessfully is it another voice or sit still the hollow man's voice it's it's almost like this is vain other voice trying futilely to interrupt you know what's being said here right and it repeats between the conception and the creation between the emotion and response Falls the shadow life is very long so a very kind of futile attempt to articulate what he really wants to say he just you can't do it this speaker can't can't successfully even speak by the end of the poem and at the end of the poem I want you to think about this passage that TS Eliot es Eliot wrote after this poem this is from a play he wrote titled The Rock all our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance all our ignorance brings us nearer to death but nearness to death is no nearer to God where is the life we have lost and living where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge where is the knowledge we have lost in information the cycles of heaven and twenty centuries bring us farther from God and near to the dust think of the world of the poem how how close to this world that the Hollow man's their eating from it how close is it to a benevolent good God does this seem to be a world where God's close to it seems as far as possible removed from God so think of the poetic universe in the poem kind of lacking any kind of stable markers of time and place and that would go along with this new physics that has come about in the last hundred years this this idea of instability yes and slow death that comes out of this entropy what is the speaker able to do with these natural laws I don't think he can really deal with them so that the for the speaker the death of the stars seems to matter the most and I don't know if I have anything else so the poem ends with this famous conclusion how did we do on adding some light to this poem did we open it up a wee bit we lengthened our lives and font disease [Music] how grew the earth by twos and threes [Music] great extinction happening now [Music] just like the permian [Music] there [Music]

Channel: Craig Andrews

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Keywords: T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men, analysis, Apocalypse Now analysis, Joseph Conrad, Eliot, Conrad, Dante's, Dante, multifoliate, multifoliate rose, not with a bang, but with a whimper, Craig Andrews, poetry lecture, study aid, T. S. Eliot poetry, this tumid river, entropy, Einsteinian physics, Einstein, eliot's christianity, T. S. Eliot's Christianity, high school poetry, college poetry class, this is the cactus land, cactus land

Id: -n4H5nFqpBY

Length: 34min 4sec (2044 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 25 2020