How Hollow Can Also Be Happy (Draft)

In high school, they made me read poetry. They made me learn lines and stanzas and rhyming and free verse, but they never taught me how to like poetry. They never convinced me that I could love it, either. Just when I believed that poetry would be the bane of my love for literature, I found a poet whose broken style and dark imagery suited my taste perfectly. That poet is well known, but special to me: T. S. Eliot.  

The work of his which saved poetry in my eyes is The Hollow Men. I become an instant fan if writers can fill my head with colors without mentioning a single shade. T.S. Eliot managed to fill my head with a sea of grays and browns. He blew a rattling wind through my ears, and I loved it.

 

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

The poem's first part (shown above), has some of the saddest, strongest imagery I've ever read. I can see people like scarecrows, silent and haunting. Sad. And in my mind, I picture people I actually know. At the time of my life when I first encountered The Hollow Men, my older brother who I am very close to was suffering a bit from depression. It was difficult for me to see him and not be able to help him at all. I felt like he was one of the hollow men T.S. Eliot described, and watching helplessly made me feel like one as well.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

I've skipped parts of the poem, but as you can see, it maintains a somber atmosphere across its many lines. If anything, it gets harsher and more despairing. Despite this downward spiral of bitterness, I only grew more entranced by Eliot's words. I'd given humor, happiness, hope, and joy plenty of chances, but none of the poems I read in those fields touched me at all. Some people think that when we are down, we need to be cheered up. We need hugs and parties and smiles. In my experience, a moment of sadness works just as well. I read The Hollow Men, recognized that the gloom in the lines mirrored the gloom inside of me, and in that recognition I felt less alone somehow. I felt like T.S. Eliot had written the poem for me. It was like the broken lines would match up with any of my broken pieces and together we would make a whole.

                This is the way the world ends
                This is the way the world ends
                This is the way the world ends
                Not with a bang but a whimper.

The closing lines of The Hollow Men are just stunning. Repetition can sometimes be seen as overused or amateur, but I felt like T.S. Eliot employed repetition so well. This is the way the world ends. By repeating this line three times, a reader is forced to slow down at the end of the poem. Then they are blasted with such a chilling message: A bang and a whimper.

Honestly, I felt like applauding when I finished reading this poem. This was poetry, I thought. Not rhyme scheme. Not rhythm. It was colors in my head and scarecrows standing in the corner of my room and the sound of crunching grass under my bare feet. I was utterly transported. When I returned to myself, all that gray stickiness inside me -- all that doom and gloom that smiles could not suspend -- was starting to ebb away. I wasn't magically cured, that's for sure. Literature is powerful, but not quite that much. But I felt better. I felt like things could get better.

Later, when I would reread The Hollow Men again and again, I was filled with that same gray and brown sea. I saw scarecrows and read the poem as if their raspy voices were in my ears. I was so happy to know this poem didn't lose its magic and probably never would. I read other T.S. Eliot works, loved them, and moved on to other poems as well, finding one in a hundred that I actually enjoyed. I've decided that poetry will never be my favorite -- nor do I believe that I will ever be able to really write poetry at all -- but I found that the genre has precious pearls, and that they are worth searching for.