what do you think this means?

Question

Between the desire, And the spasm
Between the potency, And the existence
Between the essence, And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is, Life is, For Thine is the

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.

-T.S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men" (1925)

Answer 1

that perhaps the end, death of this world or ourselves, is something dark and quiet, that will simply fall upon us, with no major fanfare

Answer 2

I'll give it a shot.
Desire is the reason for a spasm
Potency is the reason for existence
Essence is the reason for descent
They're kind of the same, the way each word describes the other. You could also say that the words are synonyms of each other.
In that way, the Shadow that is the Kingdom is
some place impossibly small that it, being different, falls in between two of the same thing.

Basically, T.S. Eliot wants to say that the end of the world is something large, yet very small.
This "end of the world" is actually supposed to show how it would be for someone to die, to from the vantage of that person.

Answer 3

This line is killing me:
"For Thine is, Life is, For Thine is the"

"thine"-- what is this? our possession of an object-- the kingdom (sounds biblical)

It's like he got hung up on "For thine is the kingdom"
For thine is
For thine is the

And the kingdom is somehow lost.
Is it the fault of "life" that intersects the stutter?
Surely there's some relation of "Life" to the between-ness of the shadow. That rift between ontological entities.

It's, to me, a modernist piece about the contradictory struggle of reason, how we're sabotaged by reflection, and lose the world living as we must.

Answer 4

It is description of a Biblical Needle eye where heaven (LIfe)reside...pin point...Middle point between extremes humans tend to experience.Always missed unnoticed as we move from one extreme to another. To reach that "middle" means to end the world in which individual lives and how he/she lives in, while desperately trying to comprehend its insanity...

Answer 5

To me it means that T.S.Eliot's thought was so obscure that he couldn't spit it out in a manner to be comprehended by other people. Maybe he was depressed, because the whimper business is a little, well ......(now I am the obscure one)