Poetry Commentary Debate

Mistah Kurtz - he dead.A penny for the Old GuyIWe are the hollow menWe are the stuffed menLeaning togetherHeadpiece filled with straw. Alas!Our dried voices, whenWe whisper togetherAre quiet and meaninglessAs wind in dry grassOr rats' feet over broken glassIn our dry cellarShape without form, shade without colour,Paralysed force, gesture without motion;Those who have crossedWith direct eyes, to death's other KingdomRemember us - if at all - not as lostViolent souls, but onlyAs the hollow menThe stuffed men.IIEyes I dare not meet in dreamsIn death's dream kingdomThese do not appear:There, the eyes areSunlight on a broken columnThere, is a tree swingingAnd voices areIn the wind's singingMore distant and more solemnThan a fading star.Let me be no nearerIn death's dream kingdomLet me also wearSuch deliberate disguisesRat's coat, crowskin, crossed stavesIn a fieldBehaving as the wind behavesNo nearer -Not that final meetingIn the twilight kingdomIIIThis is the dead landThis is cactus landHere the stone imagesAre raised, here they receiveThe supplication of a dead man's handUnder the twinkle of a fading star.Is it like thisIn death's other kingdomWaking aloneAt the hour when we areTrembling with tendernessLips that would kissForm prayers to broken stone.IVThe eyes are not hereThere are no eyes hereIn this valley of dying starsIn this hollow valleyThis broken jaw of our lost kingdomsIn this last of meeting placesWe grope togetherAnd avoid speechGathered on this beach of the tumid riverSightless, unlessThe eyes reappearAs the perpetual starMultifoliate roseOf death's twilight kingdomThe hope onlyOf empty men.VHere we go round the prickly pearPrickly pear prickly pearHere we go round the prickly pearAt five o'clock in the morning.Between the ideaAnd the realityBetween the motionAnd the actFalls the ShadowFor Thine is the KingdomBetween the conceptionAnd the creationBetween the emotionAnd the responseFalls the ShadowLife is very longBetween the desireAnd the spasmBetween the potencyAnd the existenceBetween the essenceAnd the descentFalls the ShadowFor Thine is the KingdomFor Thine isLife isFor Thine is theThis is the way the world endsThis is the way the world endsThis is the way the world endsNot with a bang but a whimper.My next poem will be T. S. Eliot's The Hollow Men. This work starts out with two lines. The first, "Mistah Kurtz - he dead.", is a reference to the character Mr. Kurtz from Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness. A manipulative ivory trader, he uses European technology to set himself up as a demigod in order to manipulate African tribes. Originally going into the Congo with the idea of the "white man's burden" in the forefront of his mind, he publishes literature on the native tribes. However, Kurtz is corrupted over time, setting himself up as a tyrant, and scribbling in his pamphlets "exterminate the brutes!". He dies of wasting illness in the course of the book, his final words being "The horror, the horror." The quoted line was spoken by a servant of Kurtz upon his death the next morning. It's hard to sum up the novel, I recommend that anyone reading this debate read it, as it really is a superb work.The second is a line used by children to request donations in order to buy fireworks and burn their effigies of Guy Fawkes on his eponymous holiday. Fawkes was an English Catholic who conspired to assassinate the English king and many important members of his government. The plot to do so by massive gunpowder explosion in Parliament was discovered, and Fawkes was arrested and confessed. He later committed suicide by jumping from his execution scaffold and breaking his neck.This work is in freestyle verse, with eclectic rhyming schemes and very heavy use of repetition to invoke foregrounding. Those elements that are repeated and foregrounded are the symbolic massages which limn the poem's cryptic and stirring theme in tones both subtle and stark. In the first section, the speakers of the poem, the Hollow Men, lean against one another and whisper, almost as if praying. They are dismissed by "eyes" which pass to "death's other kingdom". A small interlude characterizes the Hollow Men and their Kingdom.What are the differences between shape and form, shade and colour, gesture and motion? We are presented with stunted men in a stunted world which cannot complete itself: a greyscale world of frozen gestures and formless shapes. A field of corpse-men whispering to themselves in sibilant, futile prayers, and flinching at the thought of direct eyes without ever moving.The next section deals with death's dream Kingdom. This is either not the land to which the "direct eyes" are going, or it is the same land seen from another perspective. The eyes, rather, touch this world indirectly, they are "sunlight on a broken column." Voices other than the harsh whispers of the Hollow Men are also mentioned, singing in the wind, but they are distant, unintelligible, and connected to another potent symbol: that of the fading star.The Hollow Men shrink from terror at the thought of this dream kingdom, hoping to disguise themselves as scarecrows and thus avoid what they call "the final meeting" in that twilight kingdom, presumably with the eyes which they cannot meet even in dreams.The third section starts by shifting perspective, to a Hollow Man who is actually in death's dream Kingdom. Notice the shift from "there" to "here". It is a place of terrible sterility, in the first phrase the words "dead" and "cactus" are foregrounded through repetition of form. The land is characterized as a land of stone idols, being supplicated by disembodied, dead hands and lips. Here the Hollow Men tremble with tenderness, though it is a futile sensation, directed as it is at idols in a sterile and desolate place. The dying star makes another appearance.The fourth section begins as the Hollow Men reveal that, in this dream Kingdom, they are blind. Many dying stars watch over them, and the valley itself shares their hollowness. There are no eyes here: not the direct eyes which frighten the hollow men, or their own eyes. This is the last meeting place which they so feared, and the Men gather on the banks of a Stygian river, as if awaiting a ferryman that will never come. It is revealed that they will remain sightless and groping until the eyes reappear, as well as a perpetual star. Though they fear to meet the eyes, those eyes are, paradoxically, their only hope.The final section begins with a children's chant, replacing the mulberry bush with a prickly pear, and mentioning five o' clock in the morning, a time of dawn and rebirth. This section then launches into a perverted liturgy, using the strongest example of repetition in the poem to foreground both an inertial world with no movement or satisfaction, and "the Shadow" which causes this state. "For Thine is the Kingdom" drives home the perversion of Christian ideology, the loss of a drive towards perfection and the consumption of the world by stagnancy. "Life is very long!" laments the speaker, longing for cessation. Finally it comes, in the famous last lines of the poem, as their world ends in a whimper.Pertinent symbols:The Hollow Men: These are men of the same mold as Guy Fawkes and Mr. Kurtz, who have replaced love of their fellow man and of the transcendental with earthly ideals like nation and culture. Their idols, and they themselves, are sterile, and they fear the immutability of the transcendental which they shy from. Their words are meaningless, cannot effect real change, and in death's Kingdoms they are pathetic figures desperately striving to escape their fated oblivion while shunning their only real hope. In this manner, they descend into darkness, blindness, and utter, pathetic death. In life they were violent souls, but now they are only "the hollow men, the stuffed men."Death's dream Kingdom: This is, at once, heaven and hell. As the hollow men enter the dream Kingdom it reflects their thoughts, becomes sterile, black, filled with empty whispers and the fading twinkle of a dying ominous star. As they remain there it descends into darkness and blindness. Meanwhile, the "eyes" which directly enter death's dream Kingdom seem to follow a different path, and as the twisted world of the Hollow Men falls into shadow the eyes become more distant, first as only reflected light on a column, but eventually failing to touch their dark, blind kingdom at all.The eyes: The eyes represent those who have had faith in their fellow human beings and in the transcendent. The Hollow Men fear their gaze, and dread meeting them. As the dream Kingdom of the Hollow Men fall away the eye's remain only as "sunlight on a broken column", and the singing voices on the wind become distant. This shows that any glory and beauty in the world of the Hollow Men is a broken reflection of the glory of the dream Kingdom in which the eyes exist.The star: The star represents the transcendent. As the dream Kingdom falls away from the ideal and the "eyes" fail to touch it, the star fades to a twinkle and the land falls into blindness. The Hollow Men realize that the return of the "perpetual star" is their only hope, yet still they worship the antithesis of it in their perverted mass, choosing a symbol of sterility (the prickly pear) as the focus of their resurrection dance.The Shadow: The shadow is the meaninglessness, the insurmountable inertia, which the Hollow Men have idolized in place of the transcendental. It falls between possibility and action and paralyzes their world. It is the Shadow which has cut the Hollow Men off from both the transcendental and the "eyes" which perceive it, has dragged their dream Kingdom into blindness and shadow, and at last brings the machinery of their minds to a grinding, bitter halt, extinguishing their world with a whimper.