A Wasted Life

I was not too surprised by the most prominent words the wordle showed to be in the poem but honestly I really do not think that it should matter. In my opinion the crux of a poem should have nothing to do with the number of times it appears. It should depend solely on the individual and how they read the poem and what about it effects them the most not the most commonly used word.

The crux of the poem in my opinion is “this is the cactus land”. This was the line, for me, that let me really understand the hollow men and the lives they are living.  A cactus is a prickly and seemingly useless plant that sits in the middle of a desert. Deserts do not give too much to the rest of the earth. They’re barren, dry and ignored. But cactuses all have water stored inside them. The hollow men have all this built up potential and life inside them that will never be used. Just like how a cactus is rarely opened up to see the water inside. It literally hold the one thing necessary for life inside but no one ever sees that. These hollow men act like they are nothing. They live meaningless, isolated lives and fake their way through it. But, inside all their ambition and life is going to waste. It just sits there, never being accessed. But, just like a cactus, if accessed, it can help the dead world around it. It can give life to everything surrounding it and help the world grow and prosper, but instead, like the hollow men, they just sit in the dead ground and let their lives go to waste.