the human spirit in the modern world People are alive but inside they are dead They live without faith without soul and without true purpose Their inner hollowness shows the spiritual emptiness of modern society Fear of Facing Truth Another picture of decay is the fear of facing truth The hollow men cannot look at eyes Eyes stand for vision truth and spiritual power In the poem eyes shine like sunlight Eyes are compared to a fading star These images suggest something pure and eternal But the hollow men avoid eye contact They say Eyes I dare not meet in dreams This shows their fear of facing the truth They prefer to hide behind deliberate disguises like a rat s coat or a crow s skin Their fear of truth shows moral weakness Instead of facing reality they live in fear and lies A Dead and Broken Land Eliot also describes the world as a dead land He writes This is the dead land This is cactus land The land is dry barren and lifeless Even lips that want to kiss turn into prayers to broken stone It means human love has become useless People pray to idols instead of God This is a picture of cultural and religious decay The world is no longer fertile with faith but broken and empty ruled only by death Failure of Human Connection The hollow men also cannot connect with one another Eliot writes We grope together And avoid speech This is a complete breakdown of communication There is no real human connection in this hollow world full of hollow men There is only decay and disorder They stand together but remain divided inside Disorder has destroyed human unity Without speech without vision and without faith life becomes lonely and hopeless They are a crowd of men but each one is still alone Shadow and the Final Collapse The most powerful image of decay is the Shadow Everywhere falls the Shadow It means human action fails before it is complete Thoughts never become deeds Dreams never turn into reality Between desire and fulfilment between hope and result falls the Shadow of failure In the end Eliot writes This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper Whimper means a low feeble sound to express fear pain or unhappiness So the world is full of fear pain and unhappiness and it is likely to end this way This is the final collapse of modern civilization where disorder and decay destroy everything To wrap up Eliot gives us a dark vision of the modern world in The Hollow Men Disorder is seen in spiritual emptiness moral weakness and the collapse of human love and faith Decay is shown in the barren land the failure of religion and the shadow that falls between all human actions Eliot shows that the world does not end with glory but with despair and decay