This Hollow Valley

They are sinners, they are the dark, and he was made to bring them light, purify and brighten the blackest recesses of creation. They aren't for us. He is under the suspicion that they did not come to bring light, but perhaps to collect darkness. It stops being easy three years, two days, and thirty nine seconds in, when there aren't any clouds in the dark, bloody sky. He can still taste the blood in the back of his throat from his first torture session with Alastair.

Dried blood tastes crusty like the copper of stale pennies left to warm in the sun, stuffed deep in the pocket of a leather jacket. He clears his throat and spits, clears and spits, blood on his tongue and in-between his teeth. Alastair says this is their time to get to know each other. He knows all he needs to know about Alastair.

Alastair's a demon, nothing else about him is important. His skin is dry, has the texture of a sandpaper covered raisin. This is his calm before the storm; this is his plume of smoke before the volcanic eruption. Alastair's Mount Vesuvius and he's goddamn Pompeii. Alastair reads his memories like they're pages in a book, scenes in a documentary. He rewinds and rereads and fasts forward, pauses on his favorite parts. Alastair brings up whatever he can to hurt him emotionally, in those special places where his blade can't reach.

I know what you've been up to. Did you think I wouldn't catch on? You're so very predictable. He already knows what the answer is going to be, and it's the reason Alastair is so utterly pissed. If Alastair could breathe fire, Dean'd be a crisp. Alastair's mouth tastes of blood and rotting skin, with a distinct aftertaste of sulfur, so foul it makes him want to wretch. Alastair's tongue is dry and heavy against his, sucking out the moisture from his saliva, wrapping around his tongue like a thick, sun-wrinkled worm. If this is how Alastair wants to play, he can join in the game too.

He chomps down on Alastair's tongue as hard as he can, clamps his teeth tight together. Alastair's blood is bitter sulfur rushing down his throat, gushing from his severed tongue. When Alastair draws back he leaves a piece of his tongue in Dean's mouth; it flops around in death spasms, stops wriggling on the ground once he spits it out. He spits dingy yellow, the same yellow dripping down Alastair's chin, coloring the lines between his pointed teeth. He likes to go with the flow, let Alastair do his thing, wait for him to leave, think about his car and his brother and a cool bottle of beer.

This already feels different. This isn't Alastair gloating before he fucks him, this is something straight out of Deliverance , so he's looking at what is apparently Alastair's rape face. He should shut the fuck up. Most of him wants to. He could close his eyes and go somewhere else. One flutter of his lashes and he can be anywhere he wants, sitting in the Impala with Sam, eating a cheeseburger straight from its wrapper, grease and ketchup dripping onto the knee of his jeans.

I thought we were getting to understand each other. I thought; well here's a guy who's a quick study. This is a genius of a man. He knows what's good for him. He's going to handle his time down here swell. You lie there nonchalant, taking it like a man, when you aren't paying one lick of attention. Let me fill you in on a secret. You don't get the luxury of fantasy here. The only fantasies you can have are the ones I allow you to, the ones that involve me fucking you like you deserve.

I'm gonna push so far up your pretty ass you feel me for weeks. You'll hurt in ways you won't understand. You won't be able to muster a single thought other than prayers for death, let alone thoughts about your brother. Cut out my spleen and feed it to me? Bend me over far enough I can touch my nose to my back? His lips are one big bruise attached to his face. This is standard procedure, the signal to retreat. He would fight if he could; kick Alastair below the belt if he were able, but the rack is designed for immobility, the hooks in his thighs spreading him wide open and defenseless.

Alastair's giddy from it, from helpless begging, dick impossibly harder with every word he says, every desperate please.

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He never knew it could hurt this bad, before he'd be a little relaxed, slack because his mind was currently out of order. It was never supposed to be this. His voice is broken, trembling and strained as he chokes down tears.

Hollow Valley

He hasn't cried yet, Alastair hasn't broken him fully. They stick up into him so deep he doesn't have a quick enough reaction time to vocalize his scream before Alastair pulls out, shreds his insides like paper. We have no secrets, you and I. You got off on that, didn't you, Dean? He never thought something a demon said could make him feel dirty.

Hold you down and manhandle his way in? Sam grabbing him with his huge ass hands, a giant palm flat on the center of his chest to keep him flat on his back while he kissed him. He's slowly dying, but if there is justice somewhere in the world he'll die before Alastair can finish, before the acid eats him. A section of his large intestine comes ripping out, dragged along through him like spaghetti, the blood and bile slicking Alastair's way. He's getting fucked to death, in every sense of the word, and the reality is nowhere near as fun as it should be.

He misses when Alastair fucked him with the intention of getting himself off. Sam had rudely declined after that, mopped up the floor with motel towels. He's a bleeding mess somewhere he can't see, just behind his belly button, right on the other side of his stomach wall.

He severs it completely, as he did with Alastair's. Their wounds match, it's sort of twistedly romantic, his blood mingling with Alastair's, red and yellow making orange. What he spits is the color of fire, neon orange signs and Crayola, the ugly little backpack Sam had in second grade, a really cheesy fake tan. His blood doesn't have the flavor of Alastair's though, is one hundred percent human, not a drop of sulfur, salty with a trace of iron. He sucks all of it that he can back into his mouth; he doesn't want Alastair to lick it off him.

T.S. Eliot

His abused stomach curls in on itself, twitching, acid burning in his chest. It hurts to breathe and move and be , a waterfall of blood building inside him. Alastair speeds up his pace, hips snapping fast, a ritual in-out-in-out-in-in-in, jabbing up excruciatingly deeper. If there were an inner inch of him unscathed, it would be a pulpy mess by now.

His innards are soup; he hopes Alastair doesn't feel in the mood to drink it. He doesn't have to feel when Alastair comes, because the remaining ten feet of his small intestine coil out of him, taking the last of his blood and consciousness with it. He has begun to fear that hell is never ending. Hell may very well stretch on for eternity. There is little known of this land, no angel assigned to map it, no soul returned to supply the information. There are matters far more concerning than the endless landscape, however, secret, pressing matters that afflict his mind. It is a mental sickness, a moral plague.

He feels uncertain; he has doubts and questions, raw information when he is incapable of proper analysis. He's witnessed Dean kiss his brother on the mouth, plant his hands square on his brother's shoulders, dip his fingers into the curves on the sides of Sam's neck.

They have done more than just kiss, passed through the acceptable realm of innocent curiosity. One incestuous transgression can be forgiven, but Dean's life is heinously excessive. Dean does all activities in excess, eat and drink and fight, love; it is a surprise there is anything of him left. Zachariah ignores him; Raphael trudges forward. The terrain is swampy, sandy blood two meters deep, a marsh that a distant river trickles into.

There are dead and dying souls in the shallows, groaning with spasming gills, gasping like fish left to dry in the sun. This seems mostly ignored in heaven, the interpreted words of God of little importance, meanings jumbled and lost in translation. When it ripples Uriel's face is distorted into nothing but rays of light. There are few natural colors here; the primaries of hell are black and red and brown, the different colors of blood and flesh in its various putrid stages, the spectrum of shades for rotting flesh.

For centuries females were forbidden to marry outside their bloodline. Their father has done billions of years of work and yet it is not enough. He created the earth, created its inhabitants, composed its basic governing rules and still there are loopholes and questions. Man substitutes his own responses and assumptions in these empty spaces, but he and his brothers are not nearly as ignorant.

He would never suppose the will of God. He does not have the right. Sometimes Castiel wishes he could form thoughts without direct proof, without evidence from an outside source. The youngest is only two years old, sprinting on wobbly legs, small fangs bared. One of them latches himself onto Uriel's leg, starts to gnaw on it, pierce his light. Uriel burns the toddler to ashes with one touch of his hand, flames erupting from the young one's skin. Its scream is horrible, wild, shrieking laughter, the sound of a happy child.

Sam would laugh that way when Dean tickled the bottoms of his feet without stopping, tickled until there were tears in Sam's eyes. He asks a sibling, who tells him to ask his father, though their father is nowhere to be found. He is too low ranking to ever see the man face to face. He doesn't have the clearance. He envies Michael on occasion. His brother has seen the face of God; one of the few men or angels in history.

Moses saw God and aged years; mortals have turned to salt in the presence of angels. The unworthy are given glimpses of paradise before they burn. He does not want to burn. He thinks it was female once, it has the faintest traces of breasts, withered and dried, wrinkled black and gray skin stretched tightly over curved hips. It looks like a woman who is death, has gone to hell and back, walked into the shadows a candle and emerged from them dark; an extinguished flame and deformed, hardened wax.

She's something straight out of when plastic surgery goes wrong, an explosion of botox and fast forwarded aging, one of those mummies Sam used to show him pictures of in his school textbooks. She has a pair of massive black wings that extend towards the sky, twenty feet long from tip to tip, stretching magnificently from her back, large, impressive bat wings, the bones at the ends sharp as filed steel, dripping blood.

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Trinity Springs Middle School Middle. In lines shape without form, shade without colour, paralyzed force, gesture without motion the structure A without B , C without D seems to be highlighting the main themes in the poem: The lexical and semantic pattern in lines is related to the one in part V: So, we appreciate again the idea of paralyzed force line 12 , unfulfillment and stasis. Of course, the repetition of ideas and words is numerous all along the poem. Another kind of repetition is carried out through negation Eyes I dare not meet in dreams; these do not appear; let me be no nearer; no nearer; not that final meeting; the eyes are not here; there are no eyes here.

Eliot uses negation as an expression of sorrow and guilt, trying to avoid the unevitability of death no nearer —not that final meeting in the twilight kingdom. Part V, however, changes in a radical way the tone of the previous sections of the poem.

The verve of the nursery rhyme spins us round in a sinister way, since it disturbs the familiar mulberry bush replaced with the arid prickly pear , making the rhyme like some distorted survival of a primitive chant. This fact supports the idea of infertility and emptiness. It has been demonstrated that repetition is the fundamental element of The Hollow Men , as it can be found from the very beginning to the very end, not only emphasising structures, words and ideas, but also giving us the impression of rituality and paralysis of the actions taking place.

Everything in this poem is circular, repetitive and somewhat absurd, like a group of children dancing and singing round a prickly pear. Foregrounding can be defined as the standing out of certain elements by several means. In The Hollow Men , T. Eliot uses different literary mechanisms in order to foreground items. If we read the first two lines We are the hollow men, we are the stuffed men , we will clearly appreciate that two words are blindlingly obvious: The beginning of part IV is similar, but in those verses the emphasis falls on the negation the eyes are not here, there are no eyes here.

Nevertheless, many other devices are used to reach this effect. The same happens in line 19, where the Eyes , functioning as a direct object, appear at the beginning of the sentence. Another mechanism of foregrounding is used when individual items or ideas appear alone in a whole verse and voices are , line 25; in a field , line 34; no nearer , line 36; walking alone , line 47; in this hollow valley , line 55; sightless, unless , line 61; multifoliate rose , line This reveals the fact that the rythm of the poem is rather slow and moves in fits and starts, due to the abundance of short, enjambed sentences all along.

The deictic marks indicate the space, the time and the person —or persons- taking part in a textual situation. The Hollow Men is completely full of them. The We mentioned, obviously refers to the speaker, but also to other people. In the last stanza of Part I, we find a Those which is clearly opposite to We as it says: Even so, we cannot distinguish the complete meaning of We.

Part III shows a different situation. We could say that the speaker is not alone at the hour when we are trembling Part IV again mentions the place where the hollow men are the eyes are not here ; in this valley of dying stars, in this hollow valley, this broken jaw of our lost kingdoms, in this last of meeting places , and then a last We grope together , line 58 which clearly refers back to part I. The description of the symbols in The Hollow Men will be developed in depth in the interpretation. Nevertheless, we will sketch them out in order to perceive a general overview.

On the other hand, the voices and the eyes seem to be appalingly disembodied. In many literary interpretations the voices symbolise the act of speech and the expression of the thoughts, whereas the eyes have been considered as the external reflection of the soul.

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In the poem, we ignore who the eyes belong to. This conception of the eyes has to do with that of the star , first appearing as a fading star —a star which is fading either does not exist or is very distant because the only reminiscence we perceive from it is its light-, then becoming dying - and later perpetual —alive, eternal. Its connection with life and its religious interpretation in relation to after-death transcendence is clear. The references to the realm where The Hollow Men takes place are truly symbolical.

It is also mentioned as the twilight kingdom, valley of dying stars, hollow valley —like the men themselves-. There, the eyes do not appear and the voices are meaningless , making the subject fear that realm Let me be no nearer The beach of the tumid river line 60 may symbolise, according to Greek mythology, the river that the souls must cross in order to reach the beyond.

ELIOT - THE HOLLOW MEN

The Shadow —with a capital S - clearly connotes darkness, nightime and death. This time of midnight has always been considered as the hour of resurrection but, what has it got to do with the dance around the prickly pear? Concerning the prickly pear it must be said that due to its use instead of the mulberry bush, its symbolism is increased. In Part I, like all of other parts —except the fifth- the final line of the stanza rhymes with one of the previous lines. This tactic gives the feeling of familiarity and completion at the end of each stanza.

Partial rhymes like alas; If we bear in mind that the mentioned voices are faint, like whispers , this feeling deepens. As regards rhythm, it must be said that the tone is that of exhaustion, yet paradoxically the words do not falter and die as we are given the impression they might; rather, the atmosphere is broken by changes in style. In other cases, we may lose our breath getting tangled up with long, non-punctuated sentences lines ; lines In Part V, the rhythm dramatically changes.

The nursery rhyme in lines is somehow musical and catching, breaking with the previous sections. The last stanza is repetitive, saddening and hopeless, following the general impression of the poem. We are the hollow men, we are the stuffed men. The first verses of the poem indicate a contradiction that surprises us.

So now we appreciate the difference between the ideas of lack and abundance. This indicates submission or even surrender Alas! This idea is supported by the followng description of their voices: Our dried voices, when we whisper together are quiet and meaningless. The next stanza is configured by two verses. The first one is Shape without form, shade without color. What may it mean? At first glance, we could say that, for instance, shape and form are synonyms and shape without form is another contradiction that confirms the previous ideas about the poem. Shade without color has a similar meaning.

The whole verse gives us the idea of vanity and futility, as things can only be perceived indirectly through their external appearance. The second verse in this stanza is Paralyzed force, gesture without motion. This verses emphasises the concept of paralysis and stasis: In this sentence, the use of the present perfect instead of the present simple used so far gives us the idea of a past action recent in time, or even a remote action with a present consequence.

Those have a strong connection with us the hollow men , as they remember them, they knew who they were, but if at all line 16 -without necessity or just as a simple anecdote- the hollow, stuffed men are remebered by those as such, and not as lost, violent souls.

Part I brings the title and theme into a critical relationship. The first stanza —as well as Part V- indicates a church service and the ritual service throughout. The erstwhile worshippers disappear in a blur of shape, shade and gesture to which normality is attached. The first stanza quickly mentions one of the most important symbols in the poem: In line 19, they function as a direct object and appear at the beginning of the verse.

However, through repetition and poetic diction we could say that the speaker I is referring to the direct eyes in line And why are the eyes so terrible? Now other has been substituted by dream , meaning that the kingdom where the action takes place is not entirely real, but surreal, and it can only be perceived or imagined through a different stage of conciousness.