Whimpering World

He "saw this .
             kind of metaphysical despair as more intellectual than emotional." .
             The next lines portray an image of repetitiveness and uselessness:.
             Our dried voices, when.
             We whisper together .
             Are quiet and meaningless.
             As wind in dry grass.
             Or rats" feet over broken glass.
             In our dry cellar .
             The consecutive use of the word "dry" conveys a feeling of deadness. If everything is .
             dry then all growth is annulled. Without birth or growth there can be nothing. The arid .
             and desolate physical landscape promotes a feeling of barrenness while the "dried voices" .
             are empty and vacant, carrying connotations of death and ruin. Eliot's next reference to .
             "broken glass in our dry cellar" literally examines the pointlessness of the cellar. It has .
             been abandoned while only rats now inhabit it. The uselessness of the cellar symbolizes .
             the uselessness of human beings who have no control over anything the world will throw .
             at them.
             Shape without form, shade without colour, .
             Paralysed force, gesture without motion;.
             To describe the cellar in terms of binary oppositions Eliot wants to emphasize its .
             unnecessary qualities. Instead of just using adjectives Eliot includes an adjective and its .
             direct opposite to paint a more vivid picture of the colorless and formless setting. In fact, .
             everything is formless and colorless even the entire poem. .
             The concluding lines of part one make crucial references to Dante's "Divine .
             Comedy":.
             Those who have crossed .
             With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom.
             Remember us-if at all-not as lost.
             Violent souls, but only .
             As hollow men .
             According to Dante there are a variety of places someone's soul can go after death; .
             people may go directly to Paradise or directly to Hell. There are also people "who by .
             virtue of their pointless drifting through life have gone to a sort of nowhere, a .
             nothingness, a Limbo at the outskirts of Hell." This place of nothingness is what Eliot .
             means by "death's dream Kingdom.