What allusions are in the Hollow Men?
“five o’clock in the morning” is the traditional time of Christ’s resurrection. It represents the redemption of a hollow man. “Between the idea……the shadow” is taken from Julius Caesar. “For Thine is the Kingdom” alludes to the ending of the Lord’s Prayer.
What does We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men meaning?
The anaphora, “We are the hollow men, we are the stuffed men” suggests a paradoxical view of society being ‘stuffed’ and filled but with materialistic and futile views of life.
What does Here we go round the prickly pear meaning?
Lines 68-71 And if you didn’t have a mulberry bush, well, then you’d just have to sing about the “prickly pear” cactus. “Here we go ’round the mulberry bush” is a children’s song about people dancing around the bush “so early in the morning.”
What figurative language is used in the Hollow Men?
Simile (lines 5-9): The speaker compares their voices as being as “quiet and meaningless” as the wind or “rats’ feet over broken glass”. These sound like rattling or scraping. Repetition (lines 5, 8, 10): The speaker repeats the word “dry” to describe how hollow the men are.
What does this broken jaw of our lost kingdoms mean?
In this hollow valley. This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms. The Hollow Men are still worried about those eyes. The eyes from heaven are not present, but the lines also suggest that the Hollow Men have no vision. There is another way to interpret this line.
What does Mistah Kurtz mean?
The two epigraphs to the poem, “Mistah Kurtz – he dead” and “A penny for the Old Guy”, are allusions to Conrad’s character and to Guy Fawkes. Fawkes attempted arson of the English Houses of Parliament in 1605 and his straw-man effigy is burned each year in the United Kingdom on Guy Fawkes Night, the 5th of November.
What might Eliot mean when he describes the men as being both hollow and stuffed?
Those who’ve crossed over to the other kingdom of the dead, looking straight ahead the whole time, don’t remember these hollow men as lost, angry spirits (if they remember them at all), but rather as empty people, as people stuffed, metaphorically, with straw.
What is a Tumid River?
The “tumid river” (line 60) is likely a compilation of the Thames, the Acheron of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and the Congo of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
What does the epigraph Mistah Kurtz he dead mean?
What does wind in dry grass mean?
The Wind in Dry Grass. Tara Strahl. “…quiet and meaningless. As wind in dry grass.”
What does between conception and creation there falls the shadow?
One possible interpretation is that Eliot is talking about that other interim state between death and life – not at the end of our lives, but at the beginning. Between the conception and the creation – what is a baby after it has been conceived but before it has been born?
Where do the Hollow Men exist?
Uncanny and dream-like, “The Hollow Men” describes a desolate world, populated by empty, defeated people. Though the speaker describes these people as “dead” and the world they inhabit as the underworld (“death’s twilight kingdom”), the poem shouldn’t be read simply as a description of life after death.
What is Kurtz referring to when he says the horror the horror?
And now for those famous final words: “The horror! The horror!” (3.43). Marlow interprets this for us, saying that these words are the moment Kurtz realizes exactly how depraved human nature is—that his inability to exert even a shred of self-control is the same darkness in every human heart.