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The Hollow Men Exile Quotes
(line)
| Those who have crossed |
This is a strange poem to be dealing with exile, a concept that is usually political and not spiritual in nature. But the Hollow Men are exiled from "death's other Kingdom."
| There, the eyes are |
Where is "there"? Our guess would be Heaven or "death's other Kingdom," but the image of a "broken column" is not a happy one. At any rate, the Hollow Men do not have a good idea of what Heaven is like because they are so far away from it.
| Is it like this |
Though they are deathly afraid (pun!) of Heaven and those eyes in particular, they also have a naïve curiosity about "what's it like there?" Once again, they have no idea how to imagine this other kingdom, except through reference to their own sad existence.
| The eyes are not here |
The landscape is a no-man's-land of broken things, dying stars, and death. Like the Hollow Men, the setting is also characterized by absence: the lack of "eyes."
| Here we go round the prickly pear |
The circular motion of dancing around a spiny cactus symbolizes the lack of direction in the existence of the Hollow Men. The souls of Heaven, by contrast, moved in a straight line toward God's justice. In this revision of a children's song, Eliot substitutes a dry, bare plant ("the prickly pear") for a lush, green plant (the mulberry bush).
