Hollow Men

The Negro Leagues were one of the most important and influential movements to happen in baseball history. Without these ‘Invisible Men’, who knows where baseball’s racial standpoint with not only African American’s, but others such as Cuban, Dominican, and South American players, would be in the Major Leagues. Throughout the book, one pressing theme stays from beginning to end: Segregation.

The tone of despair and loneliness is carried on to the proceeding stanzas, and is more evident in the last two. By saying that “Water limpid as the solitudes that flee

The three poems show exile and keening, but the poems also show tactile imagery. The Wanderer show tactile imagery in line three, “wintery seas,” describes the setting is in this poem along with the tone. The Seafarer show’s tactile imagery as well, in line nine, “in icy bands, bound with frost,” the tactile imagery in this line describes the coldness of the thoughts in the lonely man’s head. In The Wife’s Lament the tactile imagery is shown in line forty seven, “That my beloved sits under a rocky cliff rimed with frost a lord dreary in spirit drenched with water in the ruined hall.” The wife in this tactile imagery is show how her husband is suffering just

Since it does, when reading each line, there is a resilient connection that allows the reader to put together and feel for what the narrator is speaking of. As each line is metrically linked, the words are further recited in a durable voice and the poem is virtually put together, musically. In the first and second lines of the third stanza, an apostrophe, a figure of speech that directly addresses an absent person or entity, is presented, “We smile, but O great Christ, our cries to thee from tortured souls arise.”

These tunnels below the city of Arras were a bizarre no-man's-land, "Rosy gloom" being not only an oxymoron, but a state of mind. Rosy is defined as the color of hope. Gloom is defined as a state despair and darkness. Used together the reader gains a sense a soldier’s state of mind. Forever in optimism, yet rooted in anguish. Once again the poet thrusts the reader back into the war. The tunnel has become so confusing to the soldier’s state of mind that he has stumbled over something directly underfoot. He thinks it is a sleeping soldier, whom he believes is alive for now our mislaid warrior speaks. There is no answer. The combatant yells at the man, his frustration of the high strung pressure he is under, bursting forth. An exclamation of annoyance and the declaration "for days he'd had no sleep" explain the soldier's robust edginess and resentment of the sleeping man. "Stinking place" reminds us that he is still in a dark lonely hole with corrupted air and only tinned goods and a strange man for company. "Savage" is the first description we get that our soldier is losing his mind and maybe his humanity. The "sleeping" man becomes a "heap," and now we know the man laying upon the earth is dead. As the

King then sums up this passage by turning his voice back to the clergymen he's addressing and says, "Then you will understand why we find it difficult to

If one were to take anything from Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men it is that even the most ordinary, normal men have the capacity to kill. The 101st Reserve Police Battalion executed at least 6,500 Jews at the Polish cities and villages of Jozefow, Lomazy, Serokomla, Lukow, Konskowola, Parczew, Radzyn, Kock, and Miedzyrzec and participated in the deportation of at least 42,000 Jews to the gas chambers in Treblinka (Browning, chapter 14, page 121). There were most likely even more killings that were never documented and much less remembered by the members of the 101st. These men had their first taste of death at Jozefow where they massacred 1,500 Polish Jews (Browning, chapter 8, page 74). It was a brutal and harrowing event where men,

The theme of emptiness is seen throughout Thomas’ poems. The wartime poet writes of his memory of livelihood and activity in villages, such as the one described in ‘Aspens’, and then how it begins to disappear as a result of war. This is shown as the village is left with a ‘lightless pane and footless road’ causing the village to appear as ‘empty as sky’ and this simile gives a sense of vastness of the effects of the war, emphasising on the emptiness in the poem. Further, the mention of the ‘cross-roads to a ghostly room’ explicates that the village is so empty that it is leading nowhere. This metaphor is ironic as cross-roads are suggestively open gateways and a sense of choice in direction. However this connotation is altered as Thomas uses the metaphor ‘ghostly room’, to portray the vacant village and this is supported by the cross-roads as they lead to emptiness and isolation. This is also seen in ‘Old Man’ as the paradox ‘only an avenue, dark, nameless, without end’ gives a sense of no lead despite the fact that an avenue should lead somewhere. It is clear here that Thomas’ state of depression is

The women are described as “gigantic”, which adds to their obscure mystery. The twelve characters hastily engage in their main task of weaving while singing the gruesome poetry.  Furthermore, the geological aspect of the setting intensifies the poem’s fantastic air as it describes the scene to be an inscrutable cave inside a hill in rural Ireland.

The speaker refers to the night as his acquaintance. This implies that the speaker has a lot of experience with the night, but has not become friends with it. Thus, because even the night, which has been alongside the speaker in comparison to anything or anyone else, is not a companion to the speaker, the idea of loneliness is enhanced. In addition, “rain” (2) is used to symbolize the speaker’s feelings of gloom and grief, because there is continuous pouring of the rain, which is unlikely to stop. In line 3, “city light” is used to convey the emotional distance between the speaker and society. Although the speaker has walked extensively, he has not yet interacted with anyone – thus distancing himself even further from society. Moreover, the moon, in lines 11 to 12, is used as a metaphor of the speaker’s feelings. The speaker feels extremely distant from society that he feels “unearthly.” The idea of isolation and loneliness in this poem is used as the theme of the poem; and the use of the setting and metaphors underscores the idea that the speaker feels abandoned from society.

In this, one could see that the speaker might be talking about death: “And when at Night –“; and how the speaker prefers the comfort of his/her faith over the comforts of the world: “I guard My Master’s Head - / ‘Tis better than the Eider-Duck’s / Deep Pillow – to have shared-” (13-16). The tone of this poem ranges from emptiness, to fullness, to joy, to complete satisfaction, and one can follow this progression through the stanzas. In the beginning, the subject, or character, was flat

The duality of his relics symmetrizes itself at the end of his tale, but not before he speaks of the oppositions of religion and sin that directly criticize his audience and, subconsciously, his own hypocrisy.

Through the course of the poem, Satan

Yet how they creep through my fingers to the deep, While I weep – while I weep! This is an indirection indication to the main character realizing that he cannot hold onto his loved one anymore. As the poem continues the main character gets even more troubled, when he says in line eight “O god! Can I not clasp them with a tighter clasp? O God! Can I not save One from the pitiless wave?” This is almost a cry for help, almost like him saying “God I tried to save my loved one, why did this happen to me? Why are they leaving me? I tried to save them!” And then in the last two lines of the second stanza, the character becomes overwhelmed with the pain and I feel almost whispers, “Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?” Fundamentally, allowing him to come to the conclusion that his loved one is gone, but that what he went through was just a bad dream, like everything else he had endured throughout his life.

The end of The Hollow Men can only be the beginning of a deep and long reflection for thoughtful readers. T.S. Eliot, who always believed that in his end is his beginning, died and left his verse full of hidden messages to be understood, and codes to be deciphered. It is this complexity, which is at the heart of modernism as a literary movement, that makes of Eliot’s poetry very typically modernist. As Ezra Pound once famously stated, Eliot truly did “modernize himself”. Although his poetry was subject to important transformations over the course of his