TS ELIOT QUOTES

s'io credesse che mia...

opening epigraph from dante's divine comedy (1321)

opening epigraph from dante's divine comedy (1321)

eliot depicts prufrock's internal suffering in an infernal modern landscape, where like the count, he is reluctant to utter his 'overwhelming question' to society

patient etherised upon a table

phantasmagoric metaphor that subverts traditional lyrical and romantic imagery

should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas

the synecdoche reduces himself into an anonymous crustacean entrapped in a sideways trajectory

till human voices wake us, and we drown

any connotations of a lovesong are subverted by the bathetic ending of death through 'drowning'

we are the hollow men/we are the stuffed men

the refrain paradoxically positions readers to recognise how spiritual hollowness 'stuff' us with false meaning

there are no eyes here/in this valley of dying stars

eliot externalises the hollow men's division of religious faith by subverting the Lord's omniscient presence

the perpetual star/multifoliate rose

hollow's subtly threaded biblical allusions display Eliot's quest for some sort of unified belief and meaning

for thine is/life is/for thine...

by fragmenting the Lord's prayer into syllables expose the hollow men's inability to remedy the inescapable nihilism of modern entrapment

not with a bang but with a whimper

the bathetic ending of hollow alludes to the 1605 fawkes gunpower plot

voices singing... was all folly

by undermining the triumphant christmas narrative, eliot alters conventional beliefs of biblical salvation

birth or death

the rhetorical binary offers a hope for spiritual rebirth

i should be glad of another death

eliot paradoxically encapsulates the absurdity of liberation found in religious conversion through the modal verb 'should'