The Hollow Men portrays a poetic consciousness in which intense nostalgia for a state of heavenly purity conflicts with

the paradoxical search for a long-lasting form of order through acts of denial and alienation. To the common observation that The Hollow Men expresses the depths of Eliots despair, one must add that the poet in a sense `chooses despair as the only acceptable alternative to the inauthentic existence of the unthinking inhabitants of the waste land. The Hollow Men is an episodic free verse poem. Eliot constructs a desolate world, deaths dream kingdom, to explore humankinds evasion from spiritual intention. The focus of the poem is on the hollow mens inability to interact with each other and with the trascendental spirituality that is their only hope. The form and range of techniques employed by the poet foreground this predicament and highlight its broad aplicability. The title of the poem draws our attention to the importance of the collective personae. The hollow men represent all humankind, and their tragic existence the poem suggests- concerns us all. The poems despair and disillusionment are no illustration of weakness; they are perfectly objective, because they are essential moments in the progress of the soul, as in the progress of traditional Christian mystic. Principles of intellectual order control the despair of The Hollow Men as well, in the way the text conciously evaluates experience in abstract terms, distinguishes between antithetical states of being and establishes, both in form and subject matter, the archetype of the Negative Way as an alternative to disorder as well as to the illusory order of visionary experience. The formal strategy of The Hollow Men, like its thematic content, seems designed to demonstrate how effectively the Shadow of the inarticulate falls between the conception and the creation of an artistic work. Formal aspects of the poem imitate the characteristics of the hollow men it portrays. For example, their desire to avoid speech finds a counterpart in the poems paucity of utterance: the technique of constant repetition and negation manages to employ only about 180 different words in a work 420 words long. The Paralyzed force, gesture without motion applies not only to the men themselves but also to the poem as a whole, which exhibits little narrative progression in the conventional sense and avoids verbs of direct action. As the hollow men grope together and whisper meaninglessly, so the poem itself gropes toward a conclusion only to end in hollow abstraction, broken prayer and the meaningless circularity of a childrens rhyme. The conscious reduction of poetic expression to a bare minimum does away with metaphor and simile and produces a final section of the poem almost completely devoid of modifiers. The poem avoids capitulation to the silence of the inarticulate

by relying on a highly structured syntax that tends to order experience in terms of binary opposition: Shape without form, shade without color or between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act. The quality of a poetic style marked by verbal austerity and relentless negation forms a structural counterpart to a thematic strategy that repudiates the validity of human experience at every level. In modern existential terms as well as those of traditional Christianity, the Negative Way leads ultimately to an encounter with the nothingness which, paradoxically, can inspire the individual with faith in God. The central images of the poem are deaths kingdoms and the eyes. The first mention of the eyes serves to foreground the lack of direction of the hollow men. Those who have crossed... to deaths other kingdoms do so with direct eyes the very guidance which the hollow men refuse to acknowledge. In their land, the eyes are not here, yet their hope rests on the prospect of these shy eyes reappearing as the perpetual star, multifoliate rose. The star is another recurrent symbol which draws attention to the plight of the hollow men. Their landscape is one of fading stars which twinkle barely enough to illuminate the image of a dead mans hand. We are given the impression that soon their landscape will silently descend into darkness. The images of this landscape construct the hollow men as being resigned to a state of suspension, paralysed by their own inability to turn conception into creation, emotion into response; spiritual redemption into their only hope. The poem privileges these supernatural symbols eyes, stars, deaths kingdomsover the natural. The hollow men are sightless, colourless, immobile and barely able to speak, while at the same time divine images linger in the landscape. The effect is to highlight a man as a finite creature distinct from the transcendental. The deliberate disguises that man makes for himself fail to hide the ultimate truth about our tragic existence. The Hollow Men explores this boundary situation in its images of finality or extremity and in a thematic structure comprising two different states of being. The poems speaker anticipates with dread that final meeting; the men grope together in this last of meeting places; the final section, in its generalised abstraction of all that has gone before, tells us that This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper. Our condition as human beings is doomed, our fate is unfortunately tragic, but the only guiltiest will be us if we cannot prevent ourselves from being the hollow men, the stuffed men.