Walking the Wall

I had left the book “The Wasteland & other poems” by T.S. Eliot in my bathroom for awhile after I finished it as I would find myself returning to “The Hollow Men” time and again for its haunting quality.

My daughter (15) came to me the other day and said she had also been reading and re-reading it, not sure what it meant but being drawn to it. Then yesterday I was getting ready and thinking about doing a post on the Hollow Men and she brought this drawing in to me–obviously the poem is still on her mind. We talked a little about what we thought it meant and plan to go through it and break it down; certainly it is not an easy poem to grasp.

I guess for me it is about fatal non-action. That if all we do is talk or whisper about injustice–we are part of the problem. That no, maybe we aren’t the lost, violent souls, but we are hollow. I’m especially drawn to section V that deals with the shadow that lies between.  That in between thinking and doing–is the shadow, and the many people get trapped in the shadowlands, essentially living out a hollow life. It is that idea of people sleep walking through life and not really being awake.

I know there is a lot more to the poem than that, but at the moment that is the essential message that I’m getting out of it. Apparantly a Switchfoot song called Meant to Live is based of of the poem (my daughter loves Switchfoot) and in the song he writes: “we were meant for so much more, we were meant to live.”