This is not to say that such an analysis of Eliot’s lines decides the matter once and for all, of course.
And what about the conception of a new life itself? Between the desire (erotic desire?) and the spasm (orgasm?)? And do we need to dwell on the seminal possibilities of a word like ‘essence’ in this connection? This question is obviously a fraught one in the context of stem-cell research and debates over abortion. Between the conception and the creation – what is a baby after it has been conceived but before it has been born? What is being described here? One possible interpretation is that Eliot is talking about that other interim state between death and life – not at the end of our lives, but at the beginning. We then get a series of ‘between’ statements, which could not be more appropriate for this poem about interim states. The fifth and final section of ‘The Hollow Men’ is a little different: it begins with a song suggesting a dance around the aforementioned cactus (‘round the prickly pear’) at the ungodly hour of five in the morning. There is a ‘tumid river’ which might be interpreted as an allusion to the River Styx, the river across which the dead were ferried to Hades. The first four sections of ‘The Hollow Men’ describe the situation of the titular men, dwelling in the ‘dead land’ (recalling the waste land of Eliot’s earlier poem) and desert space, ‘cactus land’ (again, shades of The Waste Land here), in a sort of twilight world between ‘death and dying’. But the reference to straw effigies does pave the way for the poem’s ‘stuffed men’ with the headpieces ‘filled with straw’. Effigies of Guy Fawkes, the conspirator (though not the ringleader) arrested late on 4 November 1605 ( not 5 November) for his involvement in the Gunpowder Plot to blow up King James I and the Houses of Parliament, are burnt every year in Britain.īut with this epigraph, it begins to look less likely that empire is the theme of Eliot’s poem.
But then we come to the second epigraph, this time a reference to the familiar child’s cry on Guy Fawkes night: ‘A penny for the Old Guy’.
0 kommentar(er)
