The Hollow Men

Cam Collins
Maddox
The Hollow Men Essay
21 February 2010

The poem The Hollow Men relates to Heart Of Darkness in many different and distinct ways. In paragraph one of the poem, the theme is that Kurtz's people are hollow men and morally stagnant. However, this poem contasts with Kurtz because he is not a hollow man. This passage in Heart of Darkness relates to this theme, "It was impossible to know him and not to admire him (Conrad 113)." There is a comparison here because both works hint that Kurtz is a remarkable and astounding man. In the poem, Eliot compares the hollow men to being scarecrows with nothing inside them. Kurtz was not a scarecrow, but a hero figure that lost his way by living in the most savage place on earth. Heart of Darkness describes this theme in the passage above.

The river is also a correlation between both works. Eliot in his poem says,
"In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river (The Hollow Men 2)
This quote in Eliot's poem describes the river as a place in hell, or a pyschological barrier that keeps the people from crossing into heaven or hell. The meaning behind this quote is that the natives live in the land of the dead and they are just stuck on that shore forever. In Apocalypse Now, which is telling almost the same story as Heart Of Darkness, Captain river describes the river and the native's home as, "the worst place on earth." This concretely relates to Eliot's description of the, "tumid river."

In the second part of Eliot's The Hollow Men, he describes the home of the natives as, "death's dream kingdom (1)." He infers that the natives are people with no purpose who live in a desolate wasteland. This quote from the novel relates heavily to Eliot's statement, "When we came abreast again, they faced the river, stamped their feet, nodded their horned heads, swayed their scarlet bodies..... they shouted periodically together strings of amazing words that resembled no sounds of human language"(101). Again, this passage indicates that these people are lost and will never find their way. They are foreign to the human race, and cannot survive without Kurtz. They are a group of insane creatures that live in the most savage and terrifying place in the world.

The society that exists on the other side of the world is a land of loss and failure, a place of darkness. In The Hollow Men, Eliot says,
"Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men." (1)
This means that these people will be remembered as people who have done nothing. They are all failures. In Heart of Darkness this passage relates to the one above, "His was an impenetrable darkness. I looked at him as you peer down at a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never shines" (104). This is the main similarity between both works. Both describe the jungle as a setting of true, cold, unstoppable darkness that will never change and the people that inhabit this God-forsaken place will always be the most unpurposeful and forgot-about people in world.