Consider the following running motifs of The Hollow Men: broken objects, eyes, death's kingdoms, scarecrow imagery, and images of infertility....

"The Hollow Men" emerges out of much the same social context as Eliot's earlier "Waste Land." The period following the First World War was a time of increasing social alienation as Western society began to fracture and with it all its old certainties. The relative unity and stability of pre-war society has gone forever, and the ensuing chaos is all-embracing as we lack the spiritual depth and awareness to resist. We are all hollow.

Like Kurtz in Heart Of Darkness, we have travelled to hell, death's kingdom, and now that we've returned, we cannot adjust to new realities. We instinctively turn from society's gaze and from the eyes of others, even in dreams. We cannot even conceive of looking at the eyes of the dead at

"that final meeting 
In the twilight kingdom..."

In any case, we're practically walking corpses as it is so we already exist in a world of the dead. We are all as hollow as scarecrows, with no soul or inner life. We could not look each other in the eye even if we wanted to. Our terrifying new world is broken; the word is used only once in the poem but both the work and its social context are irredeemably shattered. Eliot doesn't explicitly need to use the word "broken" more than once because everything about the poem and its structure positively screams of fracture.

Scarecrows are just bundles of sticks and straw. As scarecrows, men of straw, we are damned to hell. And this is a blessing. For we need to be rescued from our torment on the banks of the Acheron, the river of woe in Greek mythology. We are dead but still cannot go to hell. This is like Purgatory, but so much worse:

"In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men."

Eyes are the windows of the soul, but we have no soul so cannot see. However, if eyes should reappear in the kingdom of death, then perhaps we should find it a paradise. Maybe there is hope after all. If so, it is a hope of empty men.

As men of straw, we cannot create, but only be created. As such, we cannot ever hope to renew our world. All that is left is a childish nursery rhyme about a prickly pear, which now becomes a fertility symbol for an infertile age. And so the world slouches on to its inevitable doom, creating nothing, being nothing, before going out

"Not with a bang but a whimper."