23 Sep: "The Hollow Men" part 1

I read Dispatches, very cool book about the Vietnam War. It inspired me to watch Apocalypse Now, the main character reads from the poem "The Hallow Man" by T. S. Eliot. It is a long poem. So we will read it in sections.

 "The Hollow Men" by T. S. Eliot
Mistah Kurtz-he dead
            A penny for the Old Guy

                        I

     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
    The stuffed men.
https://allpoetry.com/The-Hollow-Men

4 comments:

  1. Allie DreadfulwaterSeptember 28, 2016 at 2:44 PM

    I thought of the "Hollow" man stuffed with straw as soldiers stuffed with government. Orders given to real live men, yet remembered only as a unit- the hollow men, the stuffed men as mentioned in the last stanza in this section.

    When you think of scarecrows, you think of one standing alone in a field, guarding his crop fervently! But in this imagery you see small scarecrows gathered down in a bunker "whisper[ing] together"...not the tall erect scarecrows (still made stuffed and appearing as something that they are not). Is this how the military really works?

    This is a really cool poem- excited to read the rest.

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  2. Allie Jo DreadfulwaterSeptember 28, 2016 at 3:03 PM

    When I was adding the other poems today I looked at the title "Hallow Man" and thought, ah crap, I screwed up hollow with hallow, but indeed there are the two different mentions:

    Hallow- honor as holy
    Hollow-having a hole or empty space inside, without significance

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  3. JimboSeptember 30, 2016 at 2:06 AM

    Nice catch with the hallow and hollow. I missed that too

    It seems like a dead person in a coffin so far to me. Hallow and hollow. We should read the whole poem one day in October.

    ReplyDelete
  4. JimboOctober 9, 2016 at 2:13 AM

    https://youtu.be/IPeHO1r8paU

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