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浅析T.S.艾略特早期诗歌中的现代人形象 |
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时间：2009-8-8 16:56:54 来源：不详
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y of the modern men whom he has described in the former two poems. In Eliot’s eyes, all the modern men in that period are without any soul, they are completely hollow men.
This poem is a comment on the moral and spiritual emptiness of society at that time, and indeed characteristic of the disillusionment after the First World War. The modern men are devoid of faith and spirituality.
2.3.2 The understanding of the epigraphs
The hollow men are typical figures in this poem. The two epigraphs, “Mistah Kurtz --- he dead” and “A Penny for the Old Guy”, are two exemplary cases of the “hollow men”: Kurtz, the domineering imperialist agent finally dies miserably, lingering death, while the traitor Guy Fawkes, who tries to blow up the parliament building in 1605, is burned up on November 5 every year in the form of a stuffed effigy by children who go around begging for pennies to buy fireworks. In the former case, the “big” men feared by everybody turns out to be hollow and thoroughly contemptible, whereas in the latter case, the scarecrow figure of Old Guy is literally hollow, because he is stuffed. Here Eliot tries to represent two different types of “hollow men” in post-war Western world.[16]
2.3.3 The features of the hollow men
Its background is ‘the dead land’, and the major figure is the dead men without any motivation or any pursuit. They are spiritual empty just like the scarecrows that the farmers used to frighten the birds:” We are the hollow men(line1)/ We are the stuffed men(line2)/ Leaning together(line3)/ Headpiece filled with straw. Alas. (line4)” It is a portrait of those passionless and aimless folks who gather in the modern wasteland after the First World War. The scarecrow is appropriate to designate both the ineptness and spiritual flaccidity of the speaker and his inability to attain love. The figurative straw dummies suffer both physical and spiritual illness.
The hollow men’s “emptiness” in this poem has two implications: one refers to the spiritual emptiness, lack of pursue in spirit; the other refers to the people without any motivation, aimless, which can also be called spirit inertia. ”Shape without form, shade without color, (line11) / Paralyzed force, gesture without motion(line12)”. The lines reflect that the hollow men’s soul is frozen. According to Eliot, if people can devote the whole spirit and the life to the other world as the sage does, it’s a kind of happiness. If not, if they can put their ideals into practice firmly, even though they become the sinners in the end, it would also be a kind of richness.[17]
In the second part of this poem the speaker confesses the impossibility of facing “the eyes,” even in dreams, in the dream kingdom of his world; and in his imagination he encounters only their symbolic counterparts—sunlight, a tree, voices in the wind. Here the lost eyes are the upbraiding eyes of incarnating his redemption: the speaker takes refuge in apathy; he desires to think of himself only as a scarecrow.
In T.S. Eliot’s opinion, the civilized people in the West are not really alive. So they are described to be living in “the dead land”, “the cactus land”, “this hollow valley”, “this broken jaw of our lost kingdom”, or “this beach of the tumid river.”[18] The hollow men might be about men during or just after the First World War. They are hollow men because they never have a chance to experience life. They are stuffed with violence. They could not escape the “shadow” of the war.
In the fifth and last section the author points out the fine and not-so-fine contradictions of increasing complexity in modern life: “Between the idea (line72)/And the reality (line73)/Between the motion(line74)/And the act(line75)/Falls the Shadow. (line76)” The shadow often gives us a bad feeling. The modern men after the First World War might be still living in shadow; they lost their directions after the war; the sudden change from war to peace made them confused. The Western civilization was greatly damaged; they did not know what their future would be, and what kinds of fates they would have. The shadow also implies Prufrockian inertia that he is incapable of connecting imagination and reality. The “shadow” which falls between idea and reality, conception and creation, emotion and response, desire and spasm, potency and existence is the paralysis that seizes men who live in a completely subjective world. The shadow might hold back the hollow men when they have a sudden and good idea and attempt to do it.
In the end the hollow man says, “This is the way the world ends(line95)/This is the way the world ends(line96)/ This is the way the world ends(line97)/ Not with a bang but with a whimper. (line98)” This may be the poet’s prediction of the future fate of Western civilization and so the apathy of people. As a common person, he came into the world silently so does he leave the world. When the common man dies ther上一页 [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] 下一页
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