THE HOLLOW MEN

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.

The epigraphs of the poem- Mistah Kurtz — he dead, and A penny for the Old Guy 79 reflect
the ‘lost violent souls’80 of Kurtz and Guy Fawkes. Eliot brought these characters into this
poem to reflect the sense of what ‘lost violent souls’ mean in the poem. Eliot tries to show the
state of the life of hollow men by comparing them with lost violent souls. The hollow men
are not lost violent souls. They are not capable of any good or bad deeds. The lost violent
souls are those souls condemned in hell for their bad deeds. They are at least capable of evil
actions. The first epigraph, Mistah Kurtz - he dead, is an allusion to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness. In the novel, Conrad portrays the empty nature of man through the life of Kurtz.
Mr Kurtz, a German, travels to Congo in Africa to trade slave. Instead, he lost his senses and
exploited the natives. He tyrannized over the African natives and meets his death
unknowingly in the African wilderness. Kurtz, using idealism to rationalize murder and other
such heinous crimes, is the prototypical "hollow" man. (Willard.2000) So, he is one of the
lost violent souls condemned in hell. Guy Fawkes is a real character in English history. In
1605, Guy Fawkes unsuccessfully tried to blow up the Parliament building. But the plan was
foiled and Guy Fawkes was arrested. Later, he was condemned to death. Since then, every
year on the fifth day of November, children make effigies of Guy Fawkes and beg money to
buy fire crackers. The effigies are then burnt with fireworks. Eliot has portrayed him in the
poem to show that he is also one of the lost violent souls. At the same time, the effigy of Guy
Fawkes represents the spiritual emptiness in the life of the hollow men. The epitaph character
works to depict the poet’s thought in an objective manner for it stands for something
meaningful. “It sets up a natural contrast to the hollowness of Modern man, who
fundamentally believes in nothing and is, therefore, empty at the core of his being, like a Guy
Fawkes dummy.” (Brothers Judd. 1998)

BIRCHES BY ROBERT FROST

Written in conversational language, the poem constantly moves between reverie to

reflection, truth and imagination, earth and heaven, concrete and spirit, control and abandon
and flight and return. In the first section of the poem, he gives us the possible explanations
for the bending of the birch trees. Then he goes on to describe the snows and their beauty. A
strong sense of escapism is evident in both of these sections which becomes more evident in
the later portions of the poem when he speaks of leaving this earth because of its confusion
and make a heavenward journey. But the speaker does not want to die by leaving earth
forever. He wants to come back to this earth as he thinks earth to be the right place for love.
So, after an initial world-weariness, the poet narrator reconciles to the idea of reality.
The narrator evokes a strong nostalgia of his childhood days in this poem. The mood of the
poem is an imaginative & a dreamy one. The poem deals with the underlying themes of
human escapism, fantasy & boyhood musings. The nature also plays a substantial role in the
poem. The poem is written in blank verse with a particular emphasis on “sound of sense”.
The poem uses the natural world and seemingly every day events as a vehicle to explore the
human experience. Originally this poem was called “Swinging Birches” one of Frost’s early
works published in 1916, a title perhaps more accurately depicting the subject. In writing this
poem, Frost was inspired by his childhood experience with swinging in birches which was a
popular children’s game during his time. The poem moves back & forth between two visual
perspectives: birch trees as bent by boy’s playful swinging & by ice storms, the thematic
interweaving being somewhat puzzling. The birches bent “across the lines of straighter darker
trees” subtly introduce the theme of imagination & will opposing darker realities. The visual
image of the bent birches causes the narrator to speculate about how the tree became that
way. He prefers his idea of the boy swinging in the birch trees thus arching its branches. But,
he is forced to acknowledge the truth that the bends are caused permanently by the ice
storms. This scene combines images of beauty & distortion. Ice shells suggest radiating light
& colour, & the trees bowed to the level of the bracken suggest suffering which is lightened
by the strange image of girls leaning their hair toward the sun as if in happy submission. The
“fallen inner dome of heaven” alludes to Shelley’s “dome of coloured glass” to suggest the
shattering of the ideal into everyday reality. The narrator has become weary from his
responsibilities as an adult in this world where one has to maintain a rational outlook. The
“considerations” he is weary are conflicting claims that  leave him disoriented & stung. He
feels lost. To him life seems like “A path less wood/ Where your face burns & tickles with
the cobwebs.” In the poem the act of swinging is presented as providing a recluse from the
bitter truth or hard rationality. As the boy is climbing the tree he is climbing towards heaven
where his imagination can be set free. The poet explains that climbing the birch is an
opportunity to “get away from Earth awhile/ And then come back to it & begin over.” The
strong sense of escapism is evident in these lines.” On a figurative level, climbing a birch tree
becomes a way to escape the hard realities of the adult world. The narrator admits that he
used to be a “swinger of birches” and would like to be one again. He would like to abandon
the cares of adulthood and become a boy once again. And when he escapes these cares, when
he embraces imagination & eschews reality, he wants to do so by climbing a birch tree thus
experiencing once again the carefree attitude of youth. Here the narrator begins to probe the
power of his redemptive imagination as it moves from its playful phase toward the brink of
transcendence. “A swinger remains grounded through the roots of the trees as he climbs, but
he is able to reach beyond his normal life on the earth to higher plane of existence.” The
narrator also regrets that he can no longer find his peace of mind by swinging on birches. It is
because he is an adult, he is unable to leave his responsibilities behind & climb toward
heaven until he can start fresh  on the earth. It is also significant that the narrator’s desire to
escape from the rationality is inconclusive. He wants to escape as a boy climbing toward
heaven, but he also wants to return to the earth: both “going & coming back.” However much
our narrator would like to get away from earthly responsibilities, he does not wish to be taken
away for good. Therefore, he wants the fate to “half grant” him a wish to be distant from this
world & his responsibilities. The word half grant is of particular importance here as he is
reluctant to go away permanently. After all, “Earth’s the right place for love/ I don’t know
where it’s likely to go better.” He only wishes to go “toward heaven” & not to heaven. The
freedom of imagination is wondrous & appealing but the narrator still cannot avoid returning
to the “Truth” & his responsibilities on the ground; the escape is only a temporary one. The
poem ends on a lighter note stating that “one can do worse than being a swinger of birches.”

Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,/ But dipped its top and set me down again./
That would be good both going and coming back./ One could do worse than be a swinger of
birches.

“’Toward heaven’ but never to, never all the way, Frost fears transcendence. Despite all the
apparent moralizing (‘earth’s the right place for love’), this passage is one of the most
skeptical in Frost. He contemplates a moment when the soul may become completely
absorbed into a union with the divine. But he is earthbound, limited, afraid. No sooner does
he wish to get away from earth than he thinks of ‘fate’-- rather than God. And what might be
a mystical experience turns into a fear of death, a fear that he would be snatched away ‘not to
return.’ He rejects the unknown, the love of God, because he cannot know it, and he clings to
the finite: ‘Earth's the right place for love’.” Floyd C. Watkins/ “Going and Coming Back:
Robert Frost’s Religious Poetry” South Atlantic Quarterly 6 (Autumn 1974)

“Frost begins to probe the power of his redemptive imagination as it moves from its playful
phase toward the brink of dangerous transcendence. The movement into transcendence is a
movement into a realm of radical imaginative freedom where (because redemption has
succeeded too well) all possibilities of engagement with the common realities of experience
are dissolved. In its moderation, a redemptive consciousness motivates union between selves
as we have seen in ‘The Generations of Men,’ or in any number of Frost’s love poems. But in
its extreme forms, redemptive consciousness can become self-defeating as it presses the
imaginative man into deepest isolation.

Fascinated as he is by the show of loveliness before him, and admiring as he is of Nature as it

performs the potter’s art, cracking and crazing the enamel of ice coating on the birch trees, it
is not finally the thing itself (the ice-coated trees) that interests the poet but the strange
association be is tempted to make: ‘You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.’
Certainly, there is no question of belief involved here. The linkage of the scientifically
discredited medieval sphere with the heaps of cracked ice suggests rather the poet’s need to
break beyond the rigid standard of empirical truth, that he himself has already allowed into
the poem, and faintly suggests as well the kind of apocalyptic destruction that the imagination
seeks when unleashed (the idea that the inner dome has been smashed clearly pleases the
speaker)….

For Frost, however, and for any poet who is rooted in what I call the aesthetics of the fiction,
the simile is the perfect figure of comparison, subtler even than metaphor. Its overtness
becomes its virtue: in its insistence on the disparateness of the things compared (as well as
their likeness) it can sustain a divided vision; can at once transmute the birches--for a brief
moment Nature stands humanized and the poet has transcended the scientific universe--and,
at the same time, can allow the fictive world to be penetrated by the impurities of experience
that resist the trans-mutative process of imagination.

The shrewdness in Frost’s strategy now surfaces. While claiming to have paid homage to the
rigid standards of empirical truth in his digression on the ice-loaded branches, what he has
actually done is to digress into the language of fictions. When he turns to the desired vision of
the young boy swinging birches, he is not, as he says, turning from truth to fiction, but from
one kind of fiction to another kind of fiction: from the fiction of cosmic change and
humanized nature to the fiction of the human will riding roughshod over a pliable external
world. And the motives for all of this fooling? I think there are two: one is that Frost intends
to fox his naturalistically persuaded readers; a second is that this is what his poem is all
about--the thrusting of little fictions within alien, anti-fictive contexts. As he evokes the
image of the boy, playing in isolation, too far from the community to engage in a team kind
of sport, he evokes, as well, his cherished theme of the imaginative man who, essentially
alone in the world, either makes it or doesn’t on the strength of his creative resources. And
now he indulges to the full the desired vision that he could not allow himself in the poem’s
opening lines… One figure seems to imply another--the image of the farm youth swinging
up, out, and down to earth again recalls the boyhood of the poet….

For anyone but Frost the ‘pathless wood’ is trite. But for him it carries a complex of meaning
fashioned elsewhere. The upward swinging of the boy becomes an emblem for imagination’s
swing away from the tangled, dark wood; a swing away from the ‘straighter, darker trees’; a
swing into the absolute freedom of isolation, the severing of all ‘considerations.’ This is the
transcendental phase of redemptive consciousness, a game that one plays alone. The
downward movement of redemptive imagination to earth, contrarily, is a movement into
community, engagement, love--the games that two play together….
One really has no choice but to be a swinger of birches. In the moment when, catapulting
upward, the poet is half-granted his wish, when transcendence is about to be complete and the
self, in its disdain for earth, has lofted itself into absolute autonomy, nothing having any
claim upon it, and no return possible, then, at that moment,, the blessed pull of the earth is
felt again, and the apocalypse desired by a transcending imagination, which seemed so
imminent, is repressed. At the end of ‘Birches’ a precious balance has been restored between
the claims of a redeeming imagination in its extreme, transcendent form, and the claims of
common-sense reality. To put it in another way, the psychic needs of change--supplied best
by redemptive imagination--are balanced by the equally deep psychic need--supplied by
sceptical ironic awareness--for the therapy of dull realities and everyday considerations.”
Frank Lentricchia/ Robert Frost: Modern Poetics and the Landscapes of Self (Duke 1975)

Such a return or reconciliation would, for Blake or Shelley, amount to surrender. But Frost,
like most other American nature writers, does not posit Blake’s or Shelley’s kind of
inevitable struggle to the death between imaginative perception and natural fact. Like
Thoreau (with certain exceptions), like Emerson in his more restrained moods, Frost believes
that, in the final analysis, the two forces are capable of cooperating to achieve meaning.”
George F. Bagby/ Frost and the Book of Nature (U Tennessee 1993)

GIVE ME THE SPLENDID SILENT SUN BY WALT WHITMAN

In the writings that we have read so far, we have frequently seen the intense pressures and
tensions that the Civil War forged in Whitman’s work, often leaving him with no recourse but
to celebrate his oxymoronic reactions to the mix of “sweetness” and “sadness” he found in
his war experiences, or the blend of beauty and horror, love and death, he experienced in the
war hospitals. This 1865 poem embodies another of those irresolvable tensions—the way the
war made Whitman want to escape to a solitary rural retreat far from the urban space he
inhabited, with its continual noise and incessant reminders of the war, and the way the war
simultaneously made him want to even more fully embrace the militarized city and its
raucous sociability. Oddly, he feels an equally strong pull toward silence and noise, toward
“solitude” and “faces and streets,” and he is drawn toward composing his own “spontaneous
songs” written “for my ears only” at the same time that he wants to record and broadcast the
“strong voices, passions, pageants” and the very public “powerful throbs” of “Manhattan
streets.”

The Democratic Self

Whitman celebrates the common man by creating a unified, overarching concept of the self
that applies to individuals as well. Whitman often casts himself as the main character in his
poems, but the Walt Whitman he refers to is only partially representative of Whitman's own
opinions and experiences. He also uses "I" (or himself) to represent the archetypal American
man. This technique, known as "an all-powerful I," allows Whitman to draw all Americans
into a unified identity with the poet himself as the figurehead. The idea of the Democratic
Self is common in the work of Transcendentalist writers like Henry David Thoreau and Ralph
Waldo Emerson.
Individualism
The ideology of individualism is very prevalent in Whitman's work. This concept thrived in
America during the early nineteenth century - a democratic response to the new class of
industrial wage-workers. Like Whitman, many powerful thinkers, politicians, and writers
encouraged everyday Americans to exercise self-ownership and value original thought.
Whitman's poetry often addresses the role of the individual within a collective society while
simultaneously emphasizing the importance of self expression.
Democratic Nature of Poetry
Whitman saw his poems as more than words on a page - he frequently points out the
democratic power of poetry. He felt that form called for vocalization and sharing rather than
private, silent consumption of the words - he wrote poetry that he intended to be spoken
aloud. In addition to writing inherently communal poetry, he used the medium to celebrate
the struggles of the common man. He felt that both the form and the content of his work
could sow the democratic spirit in his readers' hearts and minds.
The Body and Soul
Whitman emphasizes the connection between the body and the soul repeatedly in his poetry.
According to Whitman, the human soul consists of two parts - mind and body. The body is
the vessel through which the soul experiences the world, and is therefore sacred. Whitman
does not search for divinity within abstract concepts but rather, he finds God in nature and in
the human body.
The Natural World
Walt Whitman often draws his readers' attention to the everyday miracles of the natural
world. He believed that nature facilitated connections between human beings over time,
distance, and superficial differences. All human beings, no matter who they are or where they
are from, interact with the same elements of nature - the water under a boat or the grass
growing around a grave. Whitman portrays nature as all powerful because it can form a
uniting bridge across any chasm - ideological or physical.
War
Whitman's career coincided with the Civil War. Therefore, many of his poems address
themes of war and the loss of humanity that results from physical conflict. Although
Whitman was a patriotic man, he was also a pacifist. He believed that war was useless and
that fighting was never an effective solution. He worked as a nurse during the Civil War and
during that time, he developed many personal relationships with wounded soldiers. He felt
that it was his personal responsibility to humanize these brave individuals and honor their
sacrifice. "Ashes of Soldiers," in particular, was inspired by soldiers that Whitman met during
the war. Though the war was over, he wanted his readers to pause their celebrations and
remember the individuals who enabled the victory.
GIVE ME THE SPLENDID SILENT SUN” BY Walt Whitman is a free verse poem which
was published in 1865 and in this period world war approaching to its end. Basically
Whitman presents the prose and cons of society both of country life and city life. There are
two parts of this poem. In first part the poet said that he is fed up from the city life and want
to enjoy the beauties of nature for which he ant to go to village but in second part he said that
I did not left my Manhattan.
The poem begins with longing of sunlight mean he wants the life of countryside because he is
totally fed up from the busy life of city life. Along with this he wanted to enjoy the life of
tranquility with the shining rays of sunlight that if you want to gaze at sun it blurs your
vision. Then he further said that the people of city life would not get the fresh fruits as people
living in village life got them so he wishes for the fresh fruits from orchards and fresh juices
that coming straight from orchards. This what he is craving for. Then again he wants that
grass which is unmowed and rough. He wants to take rest under shady tree and have a desire
that he should get the trellised grape (a structure which is used to support creeping wine
plant). He was fed up from humdrum of day to day life. He again wishes for the fresh wheat
and corn and the serene (calm) movement of animals such as cows, buffalos, goats etc. As
Wordsworth said that “nature plays a role of teacher and preacher, mother and a nurse.” He is
of the view that this is the purest of pure life where nights are perfectly quiet and gardens are
full of beautiful flowers without disturbing anyone. He wishes to marry a woman who never
adore and children who are respectful, genuine and careful to the parents and children. He
further said that he is sick of this noisy world and want peace and calm. He wanted to sing
that song which is rthymical and spontaneous. The village life does not have any artificiality.
The poet wants solitude and loneliness. He is sick to the city life.

The mood of the writer changes in the second part of poem which is the praise of city life that
keep your splendid silent sun. he is so deeply routed in city life that he was accustomed of the
habitat of city. If someone is away from city life he is just like a fish out of water. He loves
and adores the busting life of Manhattan. There is hustle and bustle in the city life. The poet
did not wants that blessings and beauties of nature. He tells that villagers can keep everything
by their own selves and did not give to anybody. He loves the crowded scenes of Manhattan
of America where streets are thronging with people and thickly appreciated. They rub
shoulders to each other while passing from any street. He is in habit of interaction of men and
women. He wanted pavements of cities rather than footpaths of village. He is of the view that
those who are in habit of city life would not adjust in village life. He wanted those eyes
which are countless in large number. He was accustomed to the city life where he wanted
moral liberal society. He wishes to live in that place where people can change their partners.
He had longings for sexual appetites. People living in city wants change. He desires for the
sound of trumpets and drums of soldiers. He wanted life full of charm, solitude and repletion.
Having bar rooms, huge hotels, dancing clubs and saloons on ship. At night torch-light
procession was held which is another mean of heavy traffic which creates rush and make city
noisy. The people wounded by rustle was also seen in Manhattan and chorus was varied. He
loves every part of Manhattan and he is devoted to it. In fact he is idol worshipper
of Manhattan. As city was known for its ostentations and artificiality so he is in praises of this
city. At the end he wants all the things of Manhattan and he never leave it.