However, perhaps we would be better off bearing in mind Brutus rather than foetuses, and think of Eliot’s chain of idea-reality-motion-act-conception-creation-emotion-response as referring to the complex relationship between our desires or aims and our actions and behaviour. #Between the dream and the reality falls the shadow seriesBut the fact that this series of ‘between’ statements, almost like a chant, is punctuated by a reference to life itself (‘Life is very long’) and to the words of the Lord’s Prayer (‘For Thine is the Kingdom’) suggest the almost divine miracle of human life. Between the conception and the creation – what is a baby after it has been conceived but before it has been born? This is not to say that such an analysis of Eliot’s lines decides the matter once and for all, of course. What is being described here? One possible interpretation is that Eliot is talking about that other interim state between death and life – not at the end of our lives, but at the beginning. And indeed, when we reach the final lines of the poem, we are told that we are witnessing the end of the world, which happens anticlimactically, with a whimper rather than a bang. In five sections, Eliot lets the collective voice of the Hollow Men address us from their between-world which is at once a desert space (‘cactus land’) and a place suggestive of entropic decay, as though the end of the world or even the universe has come: that fading star, and the general lifelessness of the world the Hollow Men inhabit, imply that this land of twilight is a world in its death throes. The ‘Hollow Men’ of the poem are themselves trapped in some sort of between-world, a limbo or purgatory between death and life, existence and nothingness, light and darkness. Instead, we find ourselves in the desert wilderness that was glimpsed sporadically in The Waste Land: an arid land which has now become everything and is everywhere. But whereas The Waste Land offered us a modern London in which people have lost their way – crowds of clerks commuting to work over London Bridge in some sort of stupor, typists having unsatisfactory romantic liaisons with estate agents on sofa-beds – ‘The Hollow Men’ leaves behind all traces of the modern world.
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