What are the symbols in The Hollow Men?
Eliot uses a tight and interrelated group of symbols, including deserts, rats, twilight, fading stars, and the hollow/stuffed men themselves, to summon a decaying civilisation, usually interpreted as representing Europe after the end of the First World War.
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 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.”
Is the Hollow Men a metaphor?
This speech contained in Lines 1 to 4 of The Hollow Men represents a Form 4 metaphor of accounting identity through intertextuality. “We are the hollow men” evokes the description of Kurtz, from Heart of Darkness, who was “hollow at the core” (Conrad, 2014, p.
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 does falls the shadow mean?
The Hollow Men find themselves between the idea of escaping their existence and the reality of actually succeeding in escaping, but between that idea and longed-for reality the ‘Shadow’ falls which will prevent them from seeing their way to achieving their aim.
What is the significance of using 5 parts in the Hollow Men?
In five sections, Eliot lets the collective voice of the Hollow Men address us from their between-world which is at once a desert space (‘cactus land’) and a place suggestive of entropic decay, as though the end of the world or even the universe has come: that fading star, and the general lifelessness of the world the …
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?
Is The Hollow Men a metaphor?
How many lines are in the poem The Hollow Men?
“The Hollow Men” is both a single hundred-line poem and a sequence of five poems (or parts).
What happens in the second section of the poem Hollow Men?
The second section of the poem begins with a ten-line stanza. Here, the speaker describes another feature of the Hollow Men. They are unable to look anyone directly in the eyes. In particular, they are worried about the eyes from “death’s dream kingdom. ” This is the first reference to Heaven.
What is the meaning of we are the Hollow Men?
The opening line states, “We are the hollow men,” in a clear reference to the title. The following line, “We are the stuffed men,” could be an allusion to the effigies (or little straw men) burnt in celebration on Guy Fawkes Day.
When was the Hollow Men by George Eliot written?
‘The Hollow Men’ is a major poem written by Eliot between The Waste Land in 1922 and his conversion to Christianity in 1927. The ‘Hollow Men’ are trapped in a limbo world between life and death,…