How Hollow Can Also Be Happy

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.  

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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. Also, the colors don't have to be bright or incandescent. Sometimes the words that stain thoughts black are my favorite. T.S. Eliot managed to fill my head with a sea of grays and browns that carried me into a different dimension. 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. Standing together, and yet standing alone within themselves. 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 from depression. I could almost see him transform into one of Eliot's hollow men. Silent and suffering.

          Shape without form, shade without colour,
          Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
           
The two lines of the poem above stand alone. The poem itself does not have a set form or pattern in its lines, and the couplet is used twice. These particular lines were chilling in their isolation, so much so that I reread them at least twice every time I read this poem before moving on. The meaning of the words is just so powerful to me, and so very easy for me to understand.

People acknowledge depression as an illness now (it only took them hundreds of years to realize that people don't choose to be sad). They agree that it's illness, but they say it isn't contagious. I suppose it was my imagination then when I felt myself catching it.

           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.

Depression exists in the mind. It grows and pulses and aches and pounds, but nobody knows anything about it except for what you share. I watched my brother suffer quietly, and it was difficult for me to not be able to help him at all. I felt like he was one of the hollow men T.S. Eliot described. Like he was stuck in the field of life, empty and hurting terribly. Watching helplessly made me feel like a hollow person as well, like my stupid brain was straw and my hands were clumsy sticks.

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

Honestly, I felt like applauding as I read this poem. This was poetry, I thought. 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 could analyze it, of course. I could think about how nothing rhymes or enjambment or diction and line groups all day long, but in the end what mattered to me the most is that all these things worked together to bring the poem to life inside of me.

           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 T.S. Eliot employed repetition so well here. This is the way the world ends. By repeating this line three times, a reader accelerates the pace of their reading right at the end. Then, with their anticipation peaking, they are blasted with such a message that almost seems to freeze time: Not with a bang but a whimper.

 In high school, they made me read poetry. I read about love and broken hearts, fields of flowers and less-traveled paths, but I didn't want any of those poems. I wanted a poem with jagged lines and words that dripped gray. I wanted a poem that ached as I did. Some people think that when we are down, we need to be cheered up. We need hugs and parties and smiles. In my experience, sometimes a brief 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 someone out there understood, at least in some small way, exactly how I felt.

I was utterly transported by T. S Eliot. 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. 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.