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The Hollow Men by T. S. Elliot again presses the seclusion people feel in the world. The poem begins with the statement “We are the hollow men” In this world we see people for what we truly are, mere shells of ourselves, a people who have lived past our time, and in this world even though we are all living long after the end of our time, we are not living together; we are trapped within ourselves.
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.
In this world we burnt ourselves out through violence and ask those who have passed on not to remember us for the acts we committed but as the shells we are. Its as though we are ashamed of what we have done.
In the second passage we fear death we hide “In a field, Behaving as the wind behaves” avoiding “death’s dream kingdom,” the place we all will go once our damnation is over: true damnation in hell. We seek to push back the clock trying to remain away from “that final meeting In the twilight kingdom”
And yet our damnation persists, we chain ourselves to these shells and hide from death, and find ourselves thinking back to the days of our youth, when we should be realizing the truth: our world is going out in “a whimper” rather than a bang because we no longer communicate. we fear those we have wronged and rather than face the consequences of our actions, which may very well be our own deaths as a coherent whole, we run from each other, as we attempt to run from our fate. In a very every-man-for-himself manner we attempt to hide from death, and in the process alienate our neighbors, making our own hells within ourselves
This fear comes about from a loss of hope in that world, and is the way they face it. The loss of hope leads to a total collapse in societies cheery disposition, leaving it with a world void of happiness, or laughter, or anything except for people locked in there own personal hells because they are to afraid of retribution for the sins they have committed the hope for some form of salvation is gone, and in its wake is only the will to survive.
