T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men"

- I find it interesting that the “Hollow Men” of Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” are characters of the Divine Comedy, because that’s also the name of a Kevin Bacon movie...This is true, yes, but that’s not the interesting part. What I find intriguing is that many times men coming back from a particularly traumatizing experience in a warzone or some sort of battle scenario are referred to as “hollow” – they are empty on the inside, not physically, but emotionally. They seem to be cut off from their own reality and cannot escape the battlefield, no matter how hard they try.
- In regards to the lines of section/stanza IV, “In this last of meeting places / We grope together / And avoid speech / Gathered on this beach of the tumid river,” I feel it has a direct correlation with the “trench warfare” that soldiers had to engage in during WWI. For a large percentage of the soldiers who went over the top, it was their last meeting place, because entering the “tumid river” that is the battlefield was certain death. The silence had to be deafening, with the cracks and pops of far-off machine gunfire intermingled with the loud booms of mortar fire the soundtrack to their almost-definite demise. It is possible that the only consolation was that the man you were sandwiched next to was in the exact same boat as you – no one was above another in the dark, dirty, dangerous trench.
- I think Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” can be applied to any war, but this work and WWI have numerous parallels that are too hard to ignore and some that, though subtle, are there, you just need to look a little deeper.