![]() Their hollowness is then explored through contrast with those who have ‘passed on’ through this place, presumably, to heaven. A ‘gesture without motion’ is not a logical possibility, in fact, but by denying the hollow men coherence even in language, their imagined reality becomes still more tenuous. Is ‘shape,’ for example, more two-dimensional a concept than ‘form’? Does ‘form’ have connotations of Plato’s Ideas? The same process of thought is repeated for ‘shade without colour’ though this is probably more obviously suggestive of a monochrome world. ![]() These have a teasing appropriateness to the half-life (or half-death?) of the hollow men: ‘shape’ and ‘form’ are potentially synonymous, but by deliberately contrasting them Eliot forces the reader into imagining shades of difference. The poem continues with a series of paradoxical statements that become a trademark of Eliot’s poetry from this point onwards (and can reasonably be associated with the paradoxes of religious language in general). ![]()
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