Summary

The speaker counts himself among a group of semi-animate effigies, heads “filled with straw,” leaning against one another in an unkempt cellar and speaking as one in an insignificant whisper (3-10). They are unmoving nonbeings who reside in a space between the abstract and sensible, between “shape” and “form,” “shade” and “colour” (11-12). The speaker suggests they are in Limbo, located on the way to Hell and reserved for those who were neither “lost” (15) nor “violent” (16) but not virtuous, either. The speaker says his group was only “the hollow men, the stuffed men” (17-18).

Although there are eyes in his dreams, the speaker – now speaking in the first person singular – does not “meet” them (19), which could mean that he doesnot encounter them or that he doesnot return their gaze. Moreover, they appear not as eyes but as “sunlight on a broken column” (23). The speaker...