The "Shadow" which falls between idea and reality, conception and creation, emotion and response, desire and spasm, potency and existence, is the paralysis which seizes men who live in a completely subjective world. Even within their own hollowness detachment is the law. Their voices are whispers, "quiet and meaningless." Groping together, they "avoid speech." They are detached from nature, and live in a place which is devoid of any spiritual presence, a "dead land," a "cactus land," a "valley of dying stars," hollow like the men themselves.
the vagueness and impalpability of "Shape without form, shade without colour, / Paralysed force, gesture without motion." The hollow men are walking corpses and their emptiness is the vacuity of pure mind detached from any reality. The poem takes place in a twilight realm of disembodied men and forces. (Jeff Willard, "Literary Allusion in the Hollow Men," Spectrum, 2000). The "Paralysed force, gesture with out motion" describes the paradoxical effect of the whole poem, which consists both of a sense of exhaustion and of a last concentrated burst of weak energy in the hope of salvation. The short lines establish a sense of breathlessness and exhaustion, while at the same time reminding the reader of some muttered incantation. Eliot's Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1956).
Each of the three groups (by ambiguities) recapitulates the preceding, until by accumulation all three groups combine in the third (Grover Smith, T.S. The oppossitions of potentiality and actuality blur as the enumeration passes from "potency" and "existence" to "essence" and "descent". Eliot's threefold grouping of contrasts between prospect and fulfilment comprehends three failures. It implies inertia incapable of connecting imagination and reality, a defect of kinesis, in par a volitional weakness and in part an external constraint. This, whatever its private value, has in the poem no clear conceptual reference. With every effort to make the potential become actual a shadow interferes. "The Hollow Men" the theme of debasement through the rejection of good, of despair through consequent guilt. The hollow men are men empty of faith, personality, moral strength, and even humanity. First published in 1925, Eliot's eery poem recalls the European wasteland that resulted from the first World War, but also foreshadows the spiritual emptiness, war and genocide of WWII. Mariano Akerman, Prickly Matters II ( Grams 453 Living Matter), collage, 2009.* Mariano Akerman, Prickly Matters I ( Grams 453 Living Matter), collage, 2009.* Shape without form, shade without colour,
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