The Hollow Men - spoken

T. S. Eliot

Synchronicity... In two conversations, with two friends, over the past two days, T. S. Eliot came up. So I followed the golden thread to one of my favourite poems, the incredibly deep and powerful The Hollow Men. It can only strike a chord in us today, as it has since its creation following on from The Waste Land. Although a dark poem, facing the fragmentation and sometimes apparent meaninglessness of modern life and the modern world, at the same time it brings us light. We are made starkly aware of our hollow selves on the edge of the abyss created by our collective disconnection from perennial sources of transcendence. Broken verse, snatches of nursery rhymes, unfinished lines from the Lord's Prayer...

Here are two very different readings! One by the poet himself. Do not be put off by his rather antiquated mannered speech, the solemn recitation in Eliot's own unique anglo-American accent. Perhaps only the poet himself can touch in his own voice the depths of his creation, however imperfect the rendering. 

And the other, possibly more accessible;  Marlon Brando as Kurz, reciting the poem in Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film Apocalypse Now.