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.

II

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

This text follows the first edition of Poems 1909–1925 (Faber and Gwyer, 1925), checked against the Internet Archive’s scans of that edition and of a Harcourt, Brace printing, and keeps Eliot’s British spellings.

In the printed book, a few lines in Part V, including “For Thine is the Kingdom” and the broken fragments that follow, are set in italics and indented. Here, they appear as plain lines. Line numbers on this page count the 98 lines of the poem and skip the epigraphs and part numbers.

“The Hollow Men” is a poem by T. S. Eliot, first published complete in Poems 1909–1925 (Faber and Gwyer, London) on November 23, 1925. In 98 lines of free verse, divided into five numbered parts, a chorus of empty, straw-stuffed figures speaks from a gray borderland between life and death. It ends with some of the most quoted lines in modern poetry: “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.”

Our reading is that “The Hollow Men” is less a poem about the end of the world than a poem about the failure to finish anything. Its speakers cannot complete an action, a meeting, or even a prayer, and in Part V, the words of the Lord’s Prayer break off mid-sentence. The famous whimper is not a prophecy of how history will end. It describes how the poem itself ends, trailing away because the hollow men cannot bring themselves to say the rest.

ON THIS PAGE
Summary · Background · Analysis and Themes · Form and Technique · Notable Lines · Themes · FAQ
Glossary · In Popular Culture · Related Poems

Summary

Two epigraphs open the poem. The first, “Mistah Kurtz—he dead,” comes from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The second, “A penny for the Old Guy,” is the cry of English children collecting money for the straw effigies they burn on Guy Fawkes Night.

In Part I, the hollow men describe themselves. They are stuffed with straw, their whispering voices are as meaningless as wind in dry grass, and they hope that those who have crossed into “death’s other Kingdom” will remember them, if at all, not as violent lost souls but only as empty men.

In Part II, the speaker fears meeting certain eyes in “death’s dream kingdom.” He would rather stay at a distance, disguised like a scarecrow in a field, and avoid “that final meeting.”

Part III shows a dead land of cactus and stone idols, where lonely people who long to kiss can only pray to broken stone. In Part IV, the eyes are absent, and the hollow men grope together beside a swollen river, unable to see unless the eyes return as a star or as a “multifoliate rose.”

Part V begins with a children’s game, “Here we go round the prickly pear.” Then a series of statements explains that a Shadow falls between every idea and its fulfillment, interrupted by lines from the Lord’s Prayer. The prayer breaks into fragments, and the poem ends by chanting that the world ends “not with a bang but a whimper.”

Background

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on September 26, 1888, and studied at Harvard before settling in England in 1914. The Waste Land (1922) made him the most talked-about poet of his generation, and in the same year, he founded the literary quarterly The Criterion.

“The Hollow Men” grew out of shorter poems written after The Waste Land. In November 1924, Harold Monro’s The Chapbook printed three of them as “Doris’s Dream Songs,” and one of these, “This is the dead land,” became Part III.

Other sections appeared in the Paris journal Commerce, which printed what became Part I with a French translation, and in The Criterion in January 1925. In March 1925, the American magazine The Dial published three sections under the title “The Hollow Men.”

Eliot then revised the pieces, added Part V, and arranged the five parts for Poems 1909–1925, published by Faber and Gwyer on November 23, 1925. That year, he had joined the firm, which later became Faber and Faber, and the poem was the only new work in the collection.

The poem was written during a dark period in Eliot’s life, when his marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood was under great strain. Many critics also read it against the exhaustion of Europe after the First World War.

In 1927, Eliot was received into the Church of England, and his later religious poems, beginning with “Journey of the Magi” and Ash-Wednesday, take up the questions of faith that “The Hollow Men” leaves open.

Eliot is said to have explained the title as a blend of William Morris’s romance “The Hollow Land” and Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Broken Men,” though some scholars treat that account with caution. The phrase “hollow men” also appears in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

Analysis and Themes

“The Hollow Men” is short, but it gathers a remarkable range of sources: Conrad, Dante, Shakespeare, an English bonfire custom, a playground song, and the Lord’s Prayer. Four ideas hold these pieces together.

Straw Men and Guy Fawkes

The second epigraph ties the hollow men to the straw “guys” that English children carry through the streets before November 5, begging a penny before the effigy is burned. Guy Fawkes was caught guarding gunpowder in a cellar beneath Parliament in 1605, and lines such as “Headpiece filled with straw” and “In our dry cellar” recall both the dummy and the plot.

The image is cruel and exact. A guy looks like a man, but it is stuffed, voiceless, and made only to be destroyed. The hollow men see themselves the same way, as figures that resemble people but have nothing inside.

The Eyes and Death’s Kingdoms

The poem names several realms: “death’s other Kingdom,” “death’s dream kingdom,” and “the twilight kingdom.” Critics often map these onto Dante, with the hollow men stuck in a kind of Limbo on the near side of a river, like the souls in the third canto of the Inferno who lived “without infamy or praise.”

The eyes that the speaker fears in Part II belong to those who have crossed over. Many readers connect them with Beatrice, whose eyes lead Dante toward heaven. To meet them would mean judgment, and perhaps grace, which is why the hollow men both dread and long for them.

The Shadow Between Idea and Act

Part V names the hollow men’s condition directly. “Between the idea / And the reality,” between “the motion / And the act,” and between “the desire / And the spasm,” there “Falls the Shadow.” Nothing they intend ever becomes real.

Many readers hear an echo of Brutus in Julius Caesar, who describes the dreamlike gap between planning a terrible deed and doing it. Eliot turns that private moment of hesitation into a permanent state of being.

A Prayer That Cannot Be Finished

Twice, the Shadow is followed by “For Thine is the Kingdom,” the closing words of the Lord’s Prayer in its Protestant form. The third time, the prayer collapses: “For Thine is / Life is / For Thine is the.” The speakers cannot get to the end of the sentence.

The final quatrain then returns to the tune of the children’s game that opened Part V. Instead of finishing the prayer, the hollow men fall back into a singsong chant, and the world ends in the same way their prayer does, with a whimper rather than a declaration.

Form and Technique

The poem is written in free verse, but it is far from shapeless. Most lines are short, with two or three strong stresses, and Eliot builds them into chants through heavy repetition: “We are the hollow men / We are the stuffed men,” and the long run of lines beginning with “Between.”

Punctuation is sparse, and many sentences run on without commas, which gives the voices a flat, whispering quality. Occasional rhymes, such as “grass” and “glass” in lines 8 and 9, surface and then disappear, like half-remembered songs.

The technique of collage, familiar from The Waste Land, appears here on a smaller scale. A nursery rhyme, a liturgical phrase, and quotations from older writers are set side by side without explanation, and the reader is left to feel the clash between them.

The last part works almost like a piece of music. The rhyme “Here we go round the prickly pear” replaces the mulberry bush of the familiar children’s song with a desert plant from Part III, and its rhythm returns in the closing lines, so that the ending sounds like a game played in a wasteland.

Notable Lines

Three passages carry most of the poem’s fame.

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Lines 1 to 4

The opening establishes the collective voice and the central image at once. The men lean on each other because they cannot stand alone, and “Alas!” is the only cry of feeling in the stanza.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

Lines 72 to 76

This is the poem’s clearest statement of paralysis. The capital S makes the Shadow almost a presence in its own right, something that stands in the doorway between thought and action.

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.

Lines 95 to 98

The closing quatrain borrows the rhythm of “This is the way we wash our clothes” from the mulberry-bush game. Repeated three times, the line builds an expectation that the last line deflates.

Themes

Four ideas run through the poem’s five parts.

Spiritual Emptiness

The hollow men are not evil. They are simply empty, stuffed with straw, and that emptiness is their tragedy. They ask to be remembered not as “lost / Violent souls” but only as hollow men, as if even damnation would require more substance than they have.

Paralysis

Every part of the poem shows a failure to act. The speaker in Part II avoids the final meeting, the lovers in Part III cannot kiss, the men in Part IV grope and “avoid speech,” and Part V explains that a Shadow falls between every wish and its fulfillment.

Judgment and Grace

The eyes, the “perpetual star,” and the “multifoliate rose” point to a world beyond the hollow men’s twilight. These images suggest that grace is still possible, but only as “The hope only / Of empty men.” Eliot’s later turn to Christianity makes this theme read as a threshold rather than a conclusion.

Endings

The poem is preoccupied with how things end: lives, kingdoms, prayers, and the world itself. Its answer is that the end may come not through catastrophe but through exhaustion, as meaning drains away until nothing is left but a children’s rhyme.

Frequently Asked Questions

These are the questions readers most often ask about “The Hollow Men.”

What Is “The Hollow Men” About?

It is about people who are spiritually empty and unable to act. A chorus of “hollow men,” stuffed with straw like Guy Fawkes effigies, waits in a dim borderland between life and death, afraid of the eyes of those who have passed on to judgment. The poem moves through five parts toward a broken prayer and ends with the world finishing “not with a bang but a whimper.”

Who Are the Hollow Men?

They are the speakers of the poem, a collective “we” rather than named characters. Eliot pictures them as scarecrows or straw guys, people who were never wicked enough to be damned or brave enough to be saved. Readers have connected them to Conrad’s Kurtz, to the souls in Dante’s Limbo, and to a generation left numb by the First World War.

What Does “Mistah Kurtz—He Dead” Mean?

It is a line from Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, in which the manager’s servant announces the death of Kurtz with these words. Kurtz is a gifted man who has gone hollow inside, and Conrad’s narrator describes him as “hollow at the core.” By placing the line at the head of the poem, Eliot suggests that his hollow men are not even granted Kurtz’s terrible vision at the end.

What Does “Not With a Bang but a Whimper” Mean?

The closing line says that the end comes not in a great explosion but in a weak, drawn-out fading. In context, it describes the hollow men themselves, whose prayer trails off into fragments instead of reaching its end. After the atomic bomb, the line was often read as a prophecy of nuclear war, and in a 1958 interview reported in the Saturday Review, Eliot said he would not write it the same way again.

What Is the “Multifoliate Rose” in “The Hollow Men”?

It is an image borrowed from the end of Dante’s Paradiso, where the saved souls in heaven are arranged like the petals of a vast white rose. In line 64, the rose stands for a grace that might still return to the hollow men. The poem calls it “the hope only / Of empty men,” so it remains a possibility rather than a promise.

Glossary

Most of the vocabulary is simple, but several words and phrases carry allusions worth knowing.

• Old Guy (epigraph): An effigy of Guy Fawkes, made of old clothes stuffed with straw and burned on November 5.
• Headpiece (line 4): The head, or the mind; here, a head stuffed with straw like a scarecrow’s.
• Paralysed (line 12): The British spelling of “paralyzed,” unable to move.
• death’s other Kingdom (line 14): The realm of the dead who have truly crossed over, as opposed to the hollow men’s borderland.
• crowskin, crossed staves (line 33): Parts of a scarecrow: a dead crow hung up as a warning and two crossed sticks for a frame.
• supplication (line 43): A humble prayer or plea.
• tumid (line 60): Swollen or overflowing; the river recalls the rivers that the dead must cross in Dante and in Greek myth.
• Multifoliate (line 64): Having many leaves or petals, as in the rose of heaven in Dante’s Paradiso.
• prickly pear (line 68): A cactus, substituted for the mulberry bush of the children’s song.
• spasm (line 85): A sudden involuntary movement; here, the physical release that desire aims at.

In Popular Culture

The poem’s best-known appearance on screen is in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), in which Marlon Brando’s Colonel Kurtz, a character based on Conrad’s Kurtz, reads from “The Hollow Men” aloud. The link closes a circle, since the poem’s first epigraph announces the death of Conrad’s Kurtz.

The composer Vincent Persichetti wrote The Hollow Men (1944) for trumpet and string orchestra, and it remains one of his most often performed works. The final line has also become a stock phrase in headlines and speeches about anything that fizzles out.

Related Poems

If “The Hollow Men” speaks to you, these poems share its sense of spiritual crisis, its broken music, or its vision of an ending.

• The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot: The longer poem that came first, with the same dry landscapes, fragments, and borrowed voices.
• Ash-Wednesday by T. S. Eliot: Written after his conversion, it turns the hollow men’s broken prayer into a slow, deliberate one.
• Journey of the Magi by T. S. Eliot: A traveler looks back on a birth that felt like a death, written soon after Eliot joined the Church of England.
• The Second Coming by W. B. Yeats: Another postwar vision of things falling apart, though Yeats imagines a violent birth rather than a whimper.
• Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold: A Victorian lament for a world in which faith has ebbed away, leaving people on a darkened shore.