Many people think that Courths and Lao Gai are typical representatives of "hollow man". In fact, real hollow people are more empty and lack the meaning of survival than they are. They should belong to the "lost" and "tyrannical soul" in the poem, and the purpose of mentioning them is to set off and highlight the "emptiness" of real hollow people. Standing on this shore, the hollow man is full of envy and admiration for the people passing by, "looking straight", hoping that they can remember themselves. The hollow man emphasizes that he is not a "lost and tyrannical soul", but a "grassy man". Although like them, those "tyrannical souls" can't "cross over", even in front of this soul, hollow people are ashamed. Courths carried out dark and evil colonization under the banner of civilization; Angry guy fawkes tried to destroy the social ruling system with extreme violence and became a sinner through the ages. However, compared with the hollow man's "form is invisible, shadow is colorless", these tyrannical souls are much richer, and their violent behavior is better than the hollow man's inaction. The hollow man would rather keep his emptiness and blindness than see the "horror" that Courths faced in black heart. They can't devote themselves to anything, traditional religious beliefs, find themselves and seek new meaning of existence. Obviously, compared with those nameless and silent hollow people in the twentieth century, Eliot is more inclined to identify with those tyrannical souls who can really face the world and put it into action.
The first poem describes a group of people with empty hearts, who get together to sing and lament: "We are empty people, our minds are full of straw, and our words and deeds are boring and meaningless." Eliot thinks that there are two countries in the world, besides the dead, there is also a country with a dream of death for the living, and the other country of death is for those who live a deep and brave spiritual life on earth, and they can live forever after death, while the empty people living in a country with a dream of death pray that those people in "another country" can remember them.
The second part of the poem, after the crying of a single voice, is full of nightmare-like terror and alarm about its own environment. The eyes that "I" dare not look straight in my dreams refer to the eyes of people who have won eternal life, that is, the "eyes that look straight" mentioned in the first chapter. These eyes will never appear in the "land of dreams of death", which is for those who have no faith and no ability to act ("tangible, vague, colorless, paralyzed and have no gesture of action"). They are tortured by a trace of truth, and only by daring to face the reality can they be saved. In their dreams (there), those eyes are like sunshine on a broken column, whose broken column is often a symbol of human spiritual ambition, and its significance is self-evident. This call is like the wind in the tree, and the songs in the wind are more solemn and distant than a dying planet. Here, the stars are the symbol of eternal life, so the extinction of the stars means how far the hollow man is from this eternal life. Since this country has fallen far behind, put on this elaborate disguise. A tuxedo (mouse skin), a black hat with a high top (crow hair) and wooden poles crossed in the field constitute the image of a scarecrow, which also symbolizes suffering and misfortune (a symbol of the crucifixion of Christ). The poet's suggestion of religious canon is only a kind of "deliberate disguise" and an avoidance of truth. The hazy country is a bridge from the country of dead dreams to the country of eternal life, where people must face the reality, while empty people lament that they will never get to this country. This dark country may be the valley of the shadow of death mentioned by the poet later.
The third part begins to describe the living environment of hollow people, that is, the dream country of death, and the inner torture brought by the revelation of the truth they don't believe. This is a dead land, a desert (cactus land). We hollow people erect stone statues, kowtow and bow down, begging for help (a dying planet flashes). Although the stone statue has been broken, there are still words in the mouth. In the same spiritual activity, empty people gather together, but they are lonely, isolated from others, unable to communicate, and can only wake up alone to realize enlightenment from the eternal world (another country of death). The hollow man sighed in the fourth relay: "There are no eyes, in the valley where the stars are dying, in this empty valley, there are no eyes here." This valley refers to the valley of the shadow of death. In Psalm 23 of the Old Testament, the lead singer said, "Although I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I am not afraid of harm, because you are with people, and your rod and staff comfort me." The poem also sang: "In this last gathering place, we groped together and met in silence on the beach where the river surged." In the third chapter of the Divine Comedy "Hell", Dante describes that those cursed souls gather together to cross the Styx and go to hell. The most disgusting of them are those who are neither bad nor good, neither loyal nor betrayed, and have nothing to do all their lives. This river is often regarded as a symbol of the separation of life and death. There, nothing can be seen, neither truth nor hope. Until those eyes reappeared, in the dim land of death (notice the image of the river mentioned above), eternal life (eternal star) and a religious transcendental reality (multi-petal rose) became the hope of hollow people.
The last sentence directly quotes the repeated nursery rhyme: "Here we bypass the overlord tree, the overlord tree, and at five o'clock in the morning, here we bypass the overlord tree", juxtaposed with the "Heaven belongs to you" picked by the poet from the Lord's prayer. The serenity of using nursery rhymes has a strong irony in itself, because this serenity is strongly related to their great inner pain and loss. Ideal and reality, emotion and action, bloodline and essence, concept and creation, desire and spasm, potential and existence all show the struggle between religious belief and ignorance and despair. The shadow of death came, and the arrival of this shadow paralyzed the spirit of every hollow person. The structure of the whole poem is very similar to the scene where people worship in public places and priests and believers sing hymns respectively. It is through the juxtaposition of nursery rhymes, philosophical discourses and the Lord's prayer that the poet shows the tragic situation of groups of people whose spirits are dead and unable to understand the truth. Even at the last moment, the hollow man did not show tragic dignity, but poor weakness. "That's how the world ended, not with a bang, but with a gentle sound." In this way, the poem returned to the beginning quotation "buy that old guy for a penny", but it was not a sad end for one person, but the unfortunate fate of a generation.
It can be seen that the biggest difference between hollow people and abandoned people is that they have a little more self-awareness. "They are empty, but they understand their own emptiness; They lack spirituality like scarecrows, but they also know that they are, because they have realized' another kingdom of death' and the people who are blessed there. " But this meager self-awareness failed to arouse their soul awakening. Their only hope of regaining their lives lies in those eyes that have touched the Eternal Star and the Double Roses, but these hollow people are unable to meet those eyes that look straight. They can't bear the fact that they are completely empty, and they are afraid to discover their own essence, although this discovery may provide the possibility of progress and improvement.
The last part can be said to be a symbol of religious ceremony. A group of hollow people circled around the cactus (that is, the "overlord tree") in vain, as if singing prayers and praying for a gift from God. However, these characters do not worship the real God or God. But they don't break the stone pillars that symbolize the inherent customs, they just "kiss" the rubble; They want to establish a new religious ceremony, but this ceremony is more ridiculous than the previous one. The hollow man has no ability to communicate with God, nor does he have the strength to meet death or pray for salvation. They can't stand the endless nothingness of their existence, so they have to complain that "life is so long", but they dare not go to "another kingdom of death" to find those they admire. They are dull, lifeless, at a loss and doing nothing, which is a symbol of the decline of civilization. Despite a vague wish, they finally refused to act and insisted on their empty and meaningless way of existence.
At the same time, the hollow man embodies a kind of mourning for civilization. Eliot was able to transcend the difficulties and disasters of the 20th century, not as a temporary and isolated event, but to reflect on the living conditions of the whole human race and the decline of western civilization, precisely because of the profound influence of the image of the whole human race's depravity and doomsday in Christian thought. This is different from China. China culture lacks strong religious spirit, so it is difficult to produce "doomsday consciousness" in the sense of Christian culture. Therefore, the great literati in China from ancient times to the present are often confined to expressing their dissatisfaction with social reality, worrying about the country and the people, and rarely have fundamental doubts about the whole human nature and the whole cultural value. The doomsday consciousness similar to that in The Hollow Man is hard to appear in China's literary works without Christian culture.
In The Hollow Man, Eliot keenly captures and expresses the spiritual emptiness and loss of modern people. In a world where there is no God and values are nothing, people have lost their faith and soul, although they are still alive. The world of modern "hollow man" seems to have lost the measure of spiritual field, and there is nothing worth doing. Except a sense of emptiness and loss, they can't get more meaningful enlightenment. In Eliot's eyes, who became more and more convinced of Christianity, people's hearts lost their condensed focus due to the absence of God. Due to the lack of divinity, the world has lost its foundation of existence. language
Judging from the form of the poem "The Hollow Man", it completely broke away from the poetic style of the old metrical poems in English poetry and got rid of the affectation in phonology. At the same time, it is also different from Whitman's poetic style, not Whitman's lyric free poetry. The hollow man is neither bold nor unrestrained, unlike the long river of emotion, which is not easy to read, as if covered with a layer of philosophical sand. It can be said that The Hollow Man is a social poem. Although it doesn't pose sharp social problems like sociological papers, it is more profound and extensive than the problems in the papers. It's very smooth, although it's not like the clear spring in Shan Ye. Let people read it with endless aftertaste and unforgettable for a long time. People feel it is deep and sharp, but like a calm lake, we only see the lake. How deep the bottom of the lake is depends on the reader's thinking and reverie.
The hollow man has no traditional meter, but the syllables are clear and easy to read. It is not a deliberate artificial carving, but a natural carving by skilled craftsmen. Eliot is very good at using repetition to enhance the emotional effect of reading aloud. Especially in repetition, the semantic changes are set off by the changes of individual keywords, which makes readers shine at the moment and leads to a fresh and harmonious language flow.
structure
Eliot's poetry belongs to the new poetry in British and American poetry, and its characteristics are closely related to poetic linguistics. Poetic linguistics is a branch of linguistics, which studies the language problems in poetry. Here, I can only ask a few questions from the specific poem "The Hollow Man", and I don't intend to tear it apart. Eliot used the types of language parallelism in The Hollow Man to make readers achieve harmony in vision, hearing and meaning. The formula for word juxtaposition is:
| a......|
| b......|
| a......|
| b......|
Wait a minute.
For example, the fifth paragraph of "The Hollow Man":
An idea in a concept
Reality and facts
Between movements is action.
And behavior and action.
The shadow fell.
,
Concept in concept
Creation and creation
Emotion in emotion
Response and reaction
The shadow fell.
,
Between desires is desire.
Spasms and spasms.
Potential power
And existence and existence.
Between essence
Decline and decline
The shadow fell.
This is also very neat in structure, and the meaning of the structure is very profound. In addition, Eliot also used the unique syntactic structure of poetry. If there are three lines at the end of paragraph 5:
because you are
Life is
Because it's yours
If we don't study it from the perspective of poetry law, the meaning here is incomprehensible; If we understand from the common syntax, we think that "For Thine is" should be "for thin", which of course leaves Eliot's original intention and connects "thin" with "Life". This poem is punctuated, so we should examine it as a whole. There is a sentence at the end of the previous section: "Because the kingdom of heaven is yours (because the kingdom of heaven belongs to you);" The end of the previous section is "Life is long". In addition, these three lines are followed by "this is the way the world ends", which can only be deciphered after the whole understanding. So "because thinness is/life is/because thinness is" (/this is the way the world ends) means: "Because the kingdom of heaven belongs to you, life is long; Because the kingdom of heaven belongs to you "(life is coming to an end) Many poems in The Hollow Man can only be understood after syntactic analysis of the poem, because the expressed meaning masks the unexpressed meaning. Poetic jurisprudence can enable readers to spy out its inner meaning from the performance phenomenon.
picture
"Broken glass" and "dry cellar" are words full of religious associations. People who believe in God have confidence and hope in their hearts, just like a cup full of wine and a cellar full of wine. The wine in the cellar of the "hollow man" has long been dry, and the glass has long been broken. Their dry voices can't sing people's songs at all. This image of "hollow man" with both form and spirit depicts the external image and mental state of modern people from the surface to the inside-withered and dull voice and empty and helpless heart. The first person "we (de)", which is used repeatedly for six times, conveys the living state and alienation state of the whole modern "civilized people", including poets, and makes poetry have a certain poetic effect of "objectification" and "depersonalization" from a certain angle.
The second part of the poem mentions "another kingdom of death or dream" and "the country of dusk" many times. The former is the kingdom of brave people who dare to face death and resolutely step into it. Here, "the eyes/reflected in the sunshine on the broken column" and "the swaying trees/songs in the wind/farther and more solemn than the fading stars". The latter is the area where hollow people stay. They are immortal, living in a dark world, wearing camouflage, "mouse's coat, crow's skin", and dare not look at those "eyes"-those "sunshine" eyes; Those are the eyes of Dante's lover Beya Tracy, the eyes of the lover that the poet once loved or loved, the eyes of God, and the eyes of reproach that children who have made mistakes dare not face up to. As a pilgrim, Dante bravely faced his inner "sin", made up his mind to repent and atone, and then bravely raised his head to meet the eyes of God. The "hollow man" lost the ability to love and the determination to repent, so he never dared to look at these "eyes" again, just like Pruefer Locke, a young man who "prepared his face", who was still "afraid to face" his lover after "a hundred blues". The bright sunshine and twinkling stars are about to disappear, leaving only the shadow-like "hollow man" swaying desperately in the empty valley and the evening breeze.