Silence

This wordle illustrates an underlying theme of The Hollow Men in its fragmentation of thought—the disjointed repetition of words that, like the men’s swollen souls, amount to nothing. It accurately shows a general breakdown—broken, pear, hollow, kingdom repeated again and again to no avail, to no further understanding. The Hollow Men too struggle with this meaninglessness, their voices falling emptily like “wind in dry grass” upon ears that will not hear. In their frozen world, where silence is far preferable to whispered nothings, the crux of the poem becomes a silent one as well. It is the underlying sentiment beneath the lines “We grope together/ And avoid speech,” that everything has fallen apart yet no one can or will communicate this. The crux is in fact, their silence, their inability to connect even as their souls overflow and they seek sentiment, relationship, any sort of relief from the influx.

This sense is also present in the last stanza, as the speaker attempts to say the Our Father which culminates with the complete breakdown of language in the lines “For Thine is/ Life is/ For Thine is the.” The prayer cannot be finished. The morals are gone, the thoughts are gone and so the words are fading. But tragically, the emotions remain. The Hollow Men are not apathetic men. They feel acutely—evident in the terror of the last stanza: “This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper.” They continue to feel, to fear, but they can no longer share, or bother to as it will fall into nothing, just as everything else has.

The crux of the Hollow Men is terrifyingly intangible, just as their world has become. It can be reflected in broken, disjointed words alone as there simply is no way to express the underlying despair but enduring sentiment the men face. The wordle does manage to impart a sense of fragmentation, of hollow repetitions and broken thought. But out of context, these words really mean nothing and will amount to nothing. They are like the Hollow Men themselves—“stuffed” but truly empty.