The Hollow Man In George Eliot's Heart Of Darkness

Eliot was different from either in being a poet who brought into consciousness, and into confrontation with one another, two opposite things: the spiritually negative character of the contemporary world and the spiritually positive character of the past tradition. He was obsessed with time. The past and modern co-exist in his poetry as an imagined present of conflicting symbols to which are attached values of spiritual life or death. Although he had very vivid pictures of the past in his mind, he never saw that past as a nostalgic world into which he could escape from the present. He always saw it as a force still surviving within the present which could be brought into life and action. For Eliot, the past of the tradition meant Europe, the

Yet there is a distinction between Guy Fawkes and Kurtz, the ‘lost/ Violent souls’ who at least exercised a choice, and the apathetic protagonists of the poem who are perceived as mere effigies. In "Heart of Darkness" as in the Commedia, the feminine symbol, a prototype of the eyes in "The Hollow Men," charts the quester's pilgrimage into the region of pain; Kurtz's descent is irretraceable. But Dante's leads finally upward to his vision, beyond the eyes, beyond even the celestial spheres. "The Hollow Men" would re-express the affirmative way by abjuring lust, the false centre, the "prickly pear" of Part V, circled in a whirling or whirlpool motion, and by declaring the speaker's hope for the eyes. But attainment of the vision, according to "The Hollow Men," is remote indeed. The agony of "Lips that would kiss," the unalleviated "anguish of the marrow / The age of the skeleton," lacerates the heart with proximate desire. People who have died and gone over to eternity – death’s other kingdom – look back towards the world of the hollow men, and think how negative and meaningless it is. “Lost violent souls” like Kurtz and Fawkes, are better off than the hollow men. They could decide on a course of action and act firmly and courageously. No doubt, their actions took a wrong direction, but action and decision, even though wrong, are to be preferred to the useless

In the first section of the poem, the Hollow Men are leaning together almost like lifeless beings. The description of them ‘leaning together’ with their heads ‘filled with straw’ makes them appear as feeble and lifeless as scarecrows. They cannot even stand or think or function on their own. The place they inhabit, as well as themselves, is described as ‘dry’ (‘our dried voices’; ‘in our dry cellar’). The meaningless lives they lead are evident here, with reference to their ‘dried voices’ that are ‘quiet and meaningless’ when they ‘whisper together’. They exist in a place between Heaven and Hell, not yet having crossed over the River Styx to make it into either place. The people who have crossed over remember them only as ‘the Hollow Men; the stuffed men’. There is some suggestion here that it is preferable to be a ‘lost violent soul’ than a ‘hollow’ and ‘stuffed’ man. The Hollow Men were too timid and cowardly to commit the violent acts (‘not as lost violent souls’) that would have brought them to Hell (‘death’s other Kingdom’). In the second section, a hollow man describes how he fears the ‘eyes’ of people who made it to ‘death’s dream kingdom,’ be it Heaven or Hell. The Hollow Men live in a fragmented, meaningless world of broken images and symbols where the ‘eyes’ are presented as disembodied. The third section of the poem describes the setting as barren and filled with ‘cactus’ and ‘stone images’. The Hollow Men