Feb-11th-2017 Edition "The Hollow Men by T.S. Elliot" Unending thoughts of mystic encrypted words that are never completely explained

Feb-11th-2017 Edition "The Hollow Men by T.S. Elliot" Unending thoughts about mystic encrypted words in this peom that are never completely explained or given a definite meaning.  

 Here's another interesting slideshow analyzing this poetry:

 http://www.slideshare.net/salmantaki/the-hollow-men-11990521




MORE Commentary T.B.A.


This poem is a project to me.  Marlon Brando in the movie Apocalypse now reminds me of some U.S. Vietnam War Veterans I've met over the years and some of their ominous warnings to me. 

 My commentary is in bold blue


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

The Hollow Men

Mistah Kurtz-he dead
            A penny for the Old Guy


                       I

    We are the hollow men

    We are the stuffed men  

What is meant by "hollow" and "stuffed men?"  The "order followers" that Mark Passio rants about in his videos https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=order+followers  ?  Or simply anyone with who reflects on his lifetime as bearing no fruit, especially near the end as his mortality is eminent?

    Leaning together  

"Peer pressure, group think, cliques, and sheep like devotion to the herd" all suggest "Leaning together" to me.  Succumbing to stockholm syndrome. Void of self respect?  Void of creativity and independent thinking  
    Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!  (head full of straw means easily incensed, flammable and volatile and suggestible like a brain washed soldier without conscience, down to the bare reptilian response system of fight or flight and be a suggestible moulded tool) 

This Japanese ScareCrow Image is so fitting and here's another version of this poem being read:  

The Hollow Men by T.S. Eliot (read by Tom O'Bedlam)

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwcP3NOCeiE&t=29s

Milgram experiment - Jeroen Busscher

http://www.slideshare.net/salmantaki/the-hollow-men-11990521

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZwfNs1pqG0

http://www.slideshare.net/salmantaki/the-hollow-men-11990521

 
    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  (dark hidden and unseen or unknown but creeping and creepy vermin rats within our own habitat feasting and feeding off the crumbs, and scraps and garbage in our own home in our own nest)
   
    Shape without form, shade without colour,
    Paralyzed force, gesture without motion;
   
    Those who have crossed
    With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom

(death's other Kingdom?  The afterlife?  The place where no one can escape the consequences of their actions of this transitory mortal life?)
    Remember us, if at all,  (If at All!)

    not as lost
    Violent souls,

     but only
    As the hollow men
    The stuffed men.  (Nothing nothing nothing but complete void of redeeming virtue, just hollowness and stuffed with nothing good that is not any free will at all to respect self nor others.  Especially these revenge seeking high school students from Columbine High School Colorado 1998 )

   
                              II

    Eyes I dare not meet in dreams 
    In death's dream kingdom
    These do not appear:

   (Is this description of a failure to dare meet eyes a failure to meet the eyes of one's fellow human being and respect such human being as 2 human beings exchanging eye contact?  Like the end result of an old soldier haunted by the ghosts of his innocent victims and the collateral damage? 


Is this the ideal and optimum "meeting of eyes"  https://heterocentricpride.blogspot.com/2017/01/this-kind-of-love-results-in.html  So balanced and beautiful, our wicked civilization dares not meet?

 

    There, the eyes are
    Sunlight on a broken column
    There, is a tree swinging
    And voices are
    In the wind's singing
    More distant and more solemn
    Than a fading star. 
   
    Let me be no nearer
    In death's dream kingdom
    Let me also wear
    Such deliberate disguises 
    Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves (police and military and bumkin dumbfuck corporate tools and shills Uniforms'?  )
    In a field
    Behaving as the wind behaves
    No nearer-
   
    Not that final meeting
    In the twilight kingdom

   
                   III

    This is the dead land
    This is cactus land
    Here the stone images
    Are raised, here they receive
    The supplication of a dead man's hand
    Under the twinkle of a fading star.
   
    Is it like this
    In death's other kingdom
    Waking alone
    At the hour when we are
    Trembling with tenderness
    Lips that would kiss
    Form prayers to broken stone.

   
                     IV

    The eyes are not here
    There are no eyes here
    In this valley of dying stars
    In this hollow valley
    This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
   
    In this last of meeting places
    We grope togetherhttp://www.slideshare.net/salmantaki/the-hollow-men-11990521
    And avoid speech
    Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
   
    Sightless, unless
    The eyes reappear
    As the perpetual star
    Multifoliate rose
    Of death's twilight kingdom
    The hope only
    Of empty men.

   
                           V

    Here we go round the prickly pear
    Prickly pear prickly pear
    Here we go round the prickly pear
    At five o'clock in the morning.
   
    Between the idea
    And the reality
    Between the motion
    And the act
    Falls the Shadow
                                   For Thine is the Kingdom
   
    Between the conception
    And the creation
    Between the emotion
    And the response
    Falls the Shadow
                                   Life is very long
   
    Between the desire
    And the spasm
    Between the potency
    And the existence
    Between the essence
    And the descent
    Falls the Shadow
                                   For Thine is the Kingdom
   
    For Thine is
    Life is
    For Thine is the
   
    This is the way the world ends
    This is the way the world ends
    This is the way the world ends
    Not with a bang but a whimper.

1. Mistah Kurtz: a character in Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness."
2. A...Old Guy: a cry of English children on the streets on Guy Fawkes Day, November 5, when they carry straw effigies of Guy Fawkes and beg for money for fireworks to celebrate the day. Fawkes was a traitor who attempted with conspirators to blow up both houses of Parliament in 1605; the "gunpowder plot" failed.
3. Those...Kingdom: Those who have represented something positive and direct are blessed in Paradise. The reference is to Dante's "Paradiso".
4. Eyes: eyes of those in eternity who had faith and confidence and were a force that acted and were not paralyzed.
5. crossed stave: refers to scarecrows
6. tumid river: swollen river. The River Acheron in Hell in Dante's "Inferno". The damned must cross this river to get to the land of the dead.
7. Multifoliate rose: in dante's "Divine Comedy" paradise is described as a rose of many leaves.
8. prickly pear: cactus
9. Between...act: a reference to "Julius Caesar" "Between the acting of a dreadful thing/And the first motion, all the interim is/Like a phantasma or a hideous dream."
10. For...Kingdom: the beginning of the closing words of the Lord's Prayer.  © by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes 

 The whole poem describes the person going nearer and nearer to death wanting to reconcile his own sins, but no matter how much power claimed for cruelty and violence, there is only disempowerment and waning of power until the end where there's no strength nor will power to go out with a bang, but "a whimper".   Its a classic description of a journey towards these "Kingdoms" away from this material reality.