THE HOLLOW MEN

By: T. S. Eliot
May 15, 2025

A (pro- or anti-) science-, mathematics-, technology-, space-, apocalypse-, dehumanization-, disenchantment-, and/or future-oriented poem published during sf’s emergent Radium Age (c. 1900–1935). Research and selection by Joshua Glenn.

Helen Torr’s “Evening Sounds” (c. 1925–1930)

A penny for the Old Guy

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 colour.
Paralysed 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

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

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.

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

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

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.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

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.

— Published in 1925, this poem by the author of The Waste Land picks up on that earlier poem’s theme of the end of civilization, but this time the stakes are raised: It’s about the end of the whole world. Some Eliot exegetes suggest that contemporary debates surrounding entropy and the slow heat-death of the universe may offer context for “The Hollow Men.”

The first four sections had all appeared separately before the publication of the whole, in 1925. Some of the material was originally in The Waste Land. The Hollow Men are like the city crowds of The Waste Land, the damned who are so because of a lack of spiritual reality, even their sins lacking violence and conviction.

PS: One hears that the title of Nevil Shute’s 1957 end-of-the-world novel On the Beach is a reference to a Royal Navy idiom that indicates retirement from service, as well as to Eliot’s poem. The first US edition by William Morrow and Company features extracts from Eliot’s poem on the title page, including the concluding lines:

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

***

THE HOLLOW MEN

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