ENGLISH ASSIGNMENT

The Portrait in the Rock

The Hollow Men

Lakshmi Priya Sankarraj

BSc. BEd. CBZ
4th Semester
DS190045
Regional Institute of Education, Mysore
Major themes and images in “The Portrait in the Rock”
About the poet
Neruda speaks about the injustice done against humanity and also the love poems.
Here the poem, The Portrait in the Rock belongs to the second category where the
poet raises his voice against the social injustice. In the society we can see a
hierarchal order where the people are divided into different categories. Some
among the society attains a status and power to control the others. At occasions,
these hegemonic powers will harass the other by banning the human rights to them.
Through the poem, Neruda is making a protest against the hegemonic powers
which kills the rights of the citizen. The poet elaborates the idea that oppression
cannot kill the power of the society to act against the injustice.
Pablo Neruda (1904-73) was the pen name of the Chilean poet, diplomat and
politician Richard Eliecer Neftali Reyes Basoalto. In 1971 Neruda won the Nobel
Prize for Literature.
During his lifetime, Neruda occupied many diplomatic positions and served a stint
as a senator for the Chilean Communist Party. When Chilean President González
Videla outlawed communism in Chile in 1948, a warrant was issued for Neruda's
arrest. Friends hid him for months in a house. Basement in the Chilean port of
Valparaíso. Later, Neruda escaped into exile through a mountain pass near Maihue
Lake into Argentina. Years later, Neruda was a close collaborator to socialist
President Salvador Allende. When Neruda returned to Chile after his Nobel Prize
acceptance speech, Allende invited him to read at the Estadio Nacional before
70,000 people. By profession, Neruda is a writer.
Neruda wrote in a variety of styles such as erotically charged love poems as in his
collection Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair, surrealist poems,
historical epics.
Pablo Neruda’s thematic mood changes and progresses in perspective to his poems
"Body of a Woman", "Ode to the Yellow Bird", and "The Portrait in the Rock" (in
that chronological order). Neruda not only progresses from the first line to the last
line of each individual poem, but as a poet over time. For Neruda’s readers to feel
the shift in tone and the distinctive atmosphere, he uses intense imagery aided by
figurative language and symbolism. Nature is the constant in Pablo Neruda, but
through the imagery and figurative language.

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About the poem
Although, in this particular case, Pablo Neruda uses his friend’s experience and
converts it into intense poetry for a different purpose. Although it is still morose in
tone and atmosphere, it is for a bigger purpose that Neruda wrote about his friend
exiled from home, separated from all he loved. "The Portrait in the Rock" is deeper
than "Body of a Woman" and "Ode to the Yellow Bird" considering it touches on a
wider issue and unlike the preceding poems "Body of a Woman" and "Ode to the
Yellow Bird", it speaks more forwardly about a real person and a fellow poet who
was significant to Neruda. In "The Portrait in the Rock", Neruda speaks out against
authority, describing that “When he opened it, the police took him, and they beat
him up so much that he spat blood. This image can be disturbing, in addition, it
causes a distrust in authorities and an urgent need to end such violence. In this
moment, it is understandable for Neruda to write this poem. He speaks out about
death and confronts the issue of police brutality, the government forcing its ideals
onto people and the oppression of those who refuse to conform. A difference in
tone is an evident fearlessness derived from confronting the issue that correlated
with his friend’s death. What was to stop the authorities that took his friend, to
likewise harm Neruda himself? Neruda talks about a man he once knew and that
“in his nose the wind was muffling the moaning of the persecuted “With this, I
imagine the departed death as an act of martyrdom; a man who was forcefully
removed from his home and only returned dead. By the end, he honoring Cesar
Vallejo’s death and the chaos in the world which guides the poem in to nature and
life. Neruda’s poems fall into different categories. He speaks about the injustice
done against humanity and also the love poems. Here the poem, The Portrait in the
Rock belongs to the second category where the poet raises his voice against the
social injustice. In the society we can see a hierarchal order where the people are
divided into different categories. Some among the society attains a status and
power to control the others. At occasions, these hegemonic powers will harass the
other by banning the human rights to them. Neruda reminds us that poetry is not
merely an inert and beautiful thing to be appreciated, but that its flame of beauty
can give light and hope to the oppressed and it can power an engine of mass
resistance. Through the poem, Neruda is making a protest against the hegemonic
powers which kills the rights of the citizen. The poet elaborates the idea that
oppression cannot kill the power of the society to act against the injustice.
The poem starts by referring to the portrait carved on the rock. The poet says that
he knows that person very much. That person was well known to him with his
beautiful expressions and ideas. This person was a man who was tired out of his

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life. He was born in Paraguay, and these lines refer to the famous Peruvian poet
Ceasar Vallejo who was considered as one of the most innovative poets of
twentieth century. The portrait on the rock suits well with his face. He was an
ordinary man lived there with all the common comforts of a family. He had his
parents, sons, nephews, in-laws at his home. He was well read and kept books at
home. One day, the police called him at his door. They arrested him and beat him.
Out of the experience and inspiration he had from the police, he wrote poem. As in
Peru, his ideas were spread in to other countries like Denmark, Spain, Italy and
France. This is explained using a beautiful metaphor of vomiting blood. He
stopped watching his face. Then the poet stays that Vallejo was died of the torture
he had to suffer from the officials. Then he stopped receiving ideas from the great
writer’s profound silence. On a snowy night which was full of terror, he had to
escape from the officials on a horseback through the mountains. Now the poet
looks on to the rock and he sees the face of his friend; the poet on the rock. His
face was carved on the rock, with a strong expression which was created out of the
suffering he had. The weather could not defeat the feeling formed on his face. The
strong wind had wrapped his nose. He was made mute, and the wind carried the
cries of the people who were suffering like him. His face showed the pain which he
experienced at the time of his persecution. Then his exile was complete, he was
completely removed from the country by the officials. But they could not remove
him from the minds of the people. His monuments were erected all over the
country and in such a way the people gave tribute to him.
A better example of symbolism and imagery fused together has probably not been
seen. The poet with his moving words, had breathed life into a dead name and
shown us how despite the fact that the actual person is no longer present among us,
his memory continues to live forth in the hearts and minds of the persecuted, the
down-trodden. This beautiful poem tells us the story of an unsung warrior of the
unheard.
Images
 golden and stony substances: brilliant ideas and expressions (of experiences)
that stood firm in the face of state coercion
 he was... tired: refers to a state of constant struggle (through his responses as a
writer) against the state tyranny that left him spiritually exhausted Paraguay: a
country in South America, surrounded by Argentina, Brazil and Bolivia.
 healing...silence: the description of a kind of sensory impression, expressed using
words that normally describe another kind of sensory stimulation; synaesthesia

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 night of storms: a turbulent night when the forces unleashed terror on horseback:
Like his friend, the poet also became a target of state tyranny and, fearing arrest,
had to escape on horseback.
 his face...stone: This may be a tribute to Cesar Vallejo, another ode to him, his
life and struggles. Vallejo, the Peruvian poet, was considered one of the foremost
poetic innovations of the twentieth century. The man in exile depicted in the poem,
seems to fit his profile. Neruda describes Vallejo as possessing a face carved out of
stone, and like the man in the poem, Vallejo was exile. Peru has many monuments
built in his honor.
 defied: resisted with boldness and assurance; reflecting memories of resistance
against his oppressors when he lived wild weather, an atmosphere of violence and
brutality let loose by the Fascist  regime muffling: to wrap or pad in order to
deaden the sound
 muffling...persecuted: the wind carried faint, muffled cries of the victims of
police callousness against political opponents.
 Half opened books: This depicts the life of a revolutionary. Ideas and incomplete
progress is reflected by this.
 changed into stone
This refers how the people pay their tribute to the great poet. They erected many
monuments for him and his face was carved in the stone and his words in the
hearts of the people.
 In his nose the wind was muffling'
The word 'muffling' means to wrap or pad in order to deaden the sound'. The poem
is a response to the social injustice which was happening in Paraguay and the
neighboring countries. The revolutionists raised their voices against the anarchy
which was oppressing them. They faced this threat with brutality and suppressed
the revolutionist by prosecuting them. The poet Vallejo was exiled by the
autocrats. In the poem, Neruda says that the referred poet was killed and a
monument, his carved face in the rock, was erected in the country. But the face of
the portrait in the rock reflected the pain which he had to suffer during the time of
his persecution. His words were not at all heard around. The censorship of the
government restricted the portrait from having further communication. The life of
the poet was taken away. His portrait stood amongst the injustice which was

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happening in that society. The autocrats could not take away the inspiration created
by the poet. His words created an energy which made the society powerful to act
against the Fascist regime.
Themes
 Tired man
The man referred in this line is the famous Peruvian Poet Ceasar Vallejo. Vallejo was a
poet who was in exile because of the harsh words he had used in his poems to criticize
the government. He was tortured by the police every time. That is the reason for
describing him a tired.
 Life of the man in the poem.
In the poem, this man is explained common man who was spending his life with his
parents and relatives with the comforts of a man. He was well read and for this reason the
police were torturing him. The poem speaks about the violation of human rights and
censorship compelled on the citizens. The man in the poem was a poet who spoke against
the government. The police arrested him and beat him and finally sent him into exile.
 Spreading of poetry
The poet uses a beautiful expression to explain it. The man in the poem was beaten up by
the police and he spat blood in France, Denmark, Spain and Italy. This means the poet
took inspiration from the torments and the poems he wrote were spread into the nearby
countries.
 The issues of human rights
Pablo Neruda was an ardent communist. He explained his ideologies to the world through
his writings. He used the words as the mightier thing to show the rotten sides of the
communal life. In this poem, he explains how a government under dictatorship acts
against the freedom of thought, of speech and expression. The state declares a period of
national security and at the time of this emergency all the human rights are ignored. Most
often, they convince the citizens and get their approval to torture and imprison or exile
the political opponents. They use the hegemonic powers to kill the soul of the opponents.
Here in the poem, Neruda brings the example of a powerful poet. The poet used his
creative skill as weapon against the autocratic rule. But the government tries to suppress
the soul of the people who acts against them. They are brutally treated in the prisons and
expelled from the society. Some of them were killed out of the torture they had to suffer.
The poem brings out the example of the society which was banned from the basic rights
of the society.

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 Social Injustice
Throughout history, we have witnessed some people attain enough status and power to
control others. These hegemonic powers have harassed other groups of people by
taking away their basic human rights. Neruda protests against these kind of powers in
this poem and elaborates on the idea that oppression cannot kill the power of society to
act against the injustice. In the poem, a man presumed to be Vallejo because of the
mention of his hometown Paraguay is accused of a crime and killed by the police.
Vallejo was accused of being the instigator and a participant in looting and setting fire
to the Santa Maria Calderon family, who transported merchandise and alcohol by pack
animals from the coast. Vallejo hid but was discovered, arrested and thrown in Trujillo
jail. Later, it was discovered that Vallejo was not even in the place of the crime at the
time and that evidence against him was a deliberate fabrication by the judge and his
enemies for writing against the government in his books. It is noteable that the poet
Neruda himself has a similar story. Neruda was a well known communist, so when the
Chilean President outlawed communism, there was a warrant for his arrest. Neruda’s
friends hid him in Chile for a before before he escaped into exile.
 ‘Police brutality’ and ‘Violence’
The images of violence,blood and death are painted in the words ‘they beat him so much,
that he spat blood in France, in Denmark, in Spain, in Italy’. Police are supposed to be the
law keepers and on the side of the common people. But corrupt authoritarian figures use
them instead to harras and spread fear among the society. This fact is driven home by the
fact that Eduardo Gonzalez Viana, a practising lawyer and author who suppoprted
Vallejo was killed by the very French police officers who were supposed to be gaurding
him on his jouney to testify in the court, under the pretext of attempted escape.
 The life of an exile
This is also clearly explained in the poem, along with the ‘life of
a Revolutionary’. The writer(Vallejo) is described to be of ‘golden and stony
substance’, suggesting that he had a very good character and set of principles, but was
also very tired and worried all the time. Perpetual turmoil and exhaustion is the life of
a Revolutionary. He had to leave his whole life behind to avoid an unjust and terrible
fate. He left behind his family, his house and even his ‘half-open books’ which
indicate his half-completed projects and ideas
 Betrayal
There is also a subtle hint of ‘Betrayal’ in the poem. It is already established in the first
few lines of the poem that the writer had left behind everything and gone into hiding. So,
he was well aware of the consequences to opening doors without checking whether the
person standing on the other side is a friend or a foe. But he opened the door to the police
because ‘they’ called him, not the police. It suggests that ‘they’ might be people that he
trusted but they betrayed his location to the police.

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  Perseverance
Humanity persists even through all of these prosecutions because the voice of people can
never be completely silenced. This theme of ‘Perseverance’ is beautifully shown by the
image of Vallejo’s statue aka ‘The Portrait in the Rock’. After the death of this friend, the
poet stopped receiving ideas from the writer’s profound silence. On a snowy night ‘of
storms’ implying terror, he had to escape from the officals on a horseback through the
mountains. There the poet found the visage of his friend etched onto a rock. Vallejo’s
‘profile defied the weather’ suggesting that even in death the writer was a symbol of
freedom and hope. Even the weather could not defeat the feeling formed on his face. The
strong wind had wrapped his nose. He was made mute and the wind carried the cries of
people who were suffering like him. He was physically removed from his country by the
officials, but they could not remove him from the minds of the people. Infact, he was
permanently rooted to his country by the people. ‘Changed into stone, he lives in his own
country’, that is his monuments were erected all over the country and in such a way the
people gave tribute to him.

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The historical context of The Hollow Men- T S Eliot
“The Hollow Men” is a poem by the American modernist poet T.S. Eliot, first
published in 1925. Uncanny and dream-like, “The Hollow Men” describes a
desolate world, populated by empty, defeated people. Though the speaker
describes these people as “dead” and the world they inhabit as the underworld
(“death’s twilight kingdom”), the poem shouldn’t be read simply as a description of
life after death. It's also a reflection on the sorry state of European culture after the
First World War. World War I crumpled all of Europe like a paper into a ball of
despair and catapulted it, making it slowly sink into the slough of despond. For the
speaker of the poem, the horrors of the war have plunged Europe into deep despair
—so deep that European culture itself is fading away into nothingness.
The lines of this poem are jagged and irregular free verse, with no clear pattern of
enjambment. it echoes the poem’s themes. This is a poem about a culture in decay.
And the poem itself feels decayed and damaged, a collection of fragments that
never quite cohere—but whose incoherence tells a powerful story about the
speaker’s despairing frame of mind and the broken condition of his culture.
In the opening line of “The Hollow Men,” the speaker makes a strange and
unsettling announcement: he’s part of a group of “hollow” people. Moreover, he
lives in a landscape which is itself “hollow.” As the poem proceeds, however, it
becomes clear that the speaker’s hollowness is not strictly literal. Instead, it serves
as an extended metaphor for the decay of European society and culture.
The speaker describes himself—and his fellow “hollow men”—as inhuman,
dangerous, and incapable of taking real action. For instance, in the first part of the
poem, the speaker characterizes the hollow men's "voices" as "dried." Instead of
sounding like normal human voices, full of emotion and information, they are
“quiet and meaningless / As wind in dry grass.” In other words, their voices no
longer sound like human voices—and their voices no longer carry information or
emotion, like human voices are supposed to do. Instead, their voices have become
as random and senseless as the wind itself. The “hollow men” are more than
simply empty in the sense of being sad or despairing—rather, they’ve lost their
humanity.
And in the process, they’ve become a danger to human societies. In section two,
the speaker describes himself wearing a “rat’s coat” and “crowskin.” These are
symbols of disease and death, respectively, and they suggest that the “hollow
men” are dangerous to be around. This is not because they’re necessarily bad or

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malicious; if they do damage to other people, it's because they happen to be
contagious. Their despair is like a plague that passes from person to person.
Indeed, the "hollow men" seem incapable of actually doing much of anything—
much less being intentionally destructive. In section three, the speaker notes that
they “would kiss” each other, but they can’t. Instead, they “form prayers to broken
stone”—which implies that they are worshipping false idols. (For more about that,
see the “Faith and Faithlessness” theme). And the “hollow men” can’t bring
themselves to come into contact with each other or with other people; they aren’t
able to act on their desires or impulses.
However ineffective the “hollow men” are, however unable to act on their
impulses, they nonetheless have a strong effect on the world around them. Indeed,
the environment in which they live seem to have taken on their characteristics. For
instance, the speaker describes the landscape as a “hollow valley” and as a desert,
with only prickly cactuses for vegetation; the wind whistles mournfully through it.
The landscape is just as hollow as they are.
Yet while the “hollow men” are a danger to human communities, the landscape
itself is an image of a damaged culture. In lines 22-23, the speaker says that in the
desolate landscape where he lives “the eyes”—a symbol for God’s judgement—are
like “sunlight on a broken column.” The column serves here as a symbol of
Western Civilization and Western Culture: columns are one of the defining
architectural features of ancient Greek and Roman temples. For such a symbol to
be broken suggests that the landscape the speaker describes is more broadly
symbolic of Western Civilization in decline.
Instead of being a piece of science fiction about a group of hollow people, it is a
reflection on the state of European culture at the time of Eliot’s writing, right after
World War I—a devastating war that shook many people’s faith in European
culture and left behind a shattered generation of soldiers who survived. The poem’s
judgment of European culture after World War I is very negative: the culture itself
is in decline and the people who could preserve it are empty, ineffectual, and even
dangerous to their own societies.
The Hollow Men” begins with two epigraphs: quotes from (or allusions to) other texts
that Eliot uses to guide his reader into the complicated and strange world of his poem.
The first quote, “Mistah Kurtz-he dead,” comes from Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of
Darkness. The novel is, in part, the story of Captain Kurtz—an ivory trader in colonial

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Africa who is held up as an example of European enlightenment but who loses his
mind and goes to live in the bush and sets himself up as a god- like figure ruling over a
group of natives. The quote thus suggests some of the concerns of Eliot’s poem: the
poem is about the decline of European culture after World War I. Although Heart of
Darkness was published before World War I, it anticipates Eliot’s feeling that
European civilization was coming apart, and that its ideals were hollow at the core.
Captain Kurtz represents Eliot’s greatest fear for his society: that it will turn its
back on its own historical accomplishments and end up like Kurtz, “dead,” alone,
empty.
The second epigraph is a traditional saying. It comes from Guy Fawkes Day, which is
celebrated in England on November 5th. Fawkes, a Catholic revolutionary, was
arrested on November 5th, 1605 for plotting to blow up Parliament. To mark the
occasion children would make effigies of Fawkes out of straw, sticks, and old clothes;
they would then be burned on the night of the 5th. Children would go around asking
strangers for “a penny for the Old Guy”—in other words, money to help them buy
the supplies to construct their effigies. The speaker refers to Fawkes several times
over the course of the poem; the effigies of him become an image of the “hollow
men” themselves—fake, inhuman, destined for the fire.
In the following lines the poet talks about hollowness, this cavity or hollowness
could be referring emptiness or figuratively towards a meaningless life. It also
refers to living but immobile corpses, leaning against each other. Almost like a
scarecrow. ‘Leaning’ could also refer to a state of submission or surrender and
‘Headpiece filled with straw’ refers to a mind filled with nonsensical thoughts,
ideas that are not self-produced but are planted. The first four lines of the poem
itself provide a broad perspective on the vegetative state of mind of the people
back then due to the war. Men who are breathing but are dead inside living like
scarecrows; not being able to move on from their current state of mind that the
war has left them with.
This is the ...
... a fading star.
the speaker focuses on the poem’s setting, which he describes a desert: “the
dead land … cactus land.” This echoes the dryness from the first stanza, as the
speaker described a world of rustling dead grass and heads "filled with straw."
At this point in the poem, the setting feels less and less literal. It doesn’t seem

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 like a real desert. Rather, the bleakness of the poem’s setting seems like an
extended metaphor for the decline of European culture, a decline the speaker has
gradually as his underlying concern in the poem. In other words, the desert
represents the condition of Europe: it has become a cultural desert, a culturally
dead place without vibrancy or life.
And it has become a spiritually dead place as well. In lines 41-44, the speaker
describes the “hollow men” erecting “stone images” and then praying to them—
giving them, in his words, “the supplication of a dead man’s hand.” The “stone
images” allude to passages in the Bible where the Israelites start worshipping
false gods, which the Bible calls “idols” and “graven images.” In other words,
the “hollow men” are like the Israelites: they’re worshipping the wrong gods,
they've fallen into idolatry.
It suggests that the hollow men’s real problem is that they’ve lost their
connection with God, the “fading star” is a symbol of hope—and once again, that
hope is fading from the hollow men’s world.
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
These four lines wrap up the entire poem in a beautiful way. They collectively
portray the entirety of the Great War in a small shell. A war feels like the end of
the world, especially when it is one of the biggest one known to mankind back
then. Usually, when asked to imagine the end of the world, a vivid picture of loud
bangs and screams immediately pop into our heads as if we have lived through it in
an alternate life. Perhaps, Eliot thought it to be the same as well before the Great
War but he found out that the world doesn’t end on a loud note but rather very
silently through the whimpers of dead souls being carried around in living corpses.
Eliot portrayed a very graphic and vivid image of life after the Great War whereas
most poets who lived through the war were expected to talk more about life during
the war. The above four lines again bring in the aspect of how war does not
necessarily bring any signs of progression, victory, triumph, or development of
civilization. It has always and will always bring forth destruction and bloodbaths.

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Eliot also hints towards how the people losing their lives were at least done with it
and didn’t have to live with it. According to him, living with the war in an hour
head afterward is more traumatizing and agonizing than dying in the war or going
through the war in the first place. When going through war, it’s a simultaneous act
of events that goes by so fast, that we do whatever we can to adapt and survive but
surviving a war and having to relive the days spent in suffering over and over again
every day in the heads is even more agonizing.
Like many in his generation, Eliot was devastated by the war. It was, for one thing,
a very bloody war, with millions dead on both sides. And as the war dragged on, it
became harder and harder to justify. In bloody battles in France, hundreds of
thousands of soldiers were slaughtered in exchange for a few inches of ground.
The war created a crisis of confidence in European culture. Before the war, many
were deeply confident that European countries had advanced so far that they no
longer need war, that they were past violence and barbarism. The intense violence
of the War showed that just the opposite was true: that the increased power of
industrial societies allowed for killing on a scale never seen before in human
history. After the war, traumatized by the violence they’d seen and adrift in a
culture that had lost confidence in itself, many members of Eliot’s generation
became pale shells of their former selves: “hollow men.”

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