We are the hollow men, the stuffed men, leaning together, headpiece filled with straw. Eliot wrote this between The Waste Land and Ash Wednesday, and it is his bleakest poem, shadowed by Dante's Limbo and Conrad's Kurtz. The verse is incantatory, the spiritual emptiness total. This is the way the world ends: not with a bang but a whimper. The line has entered the language as prophecy. The hollow men cannot even damn themselves properly. The shadow falls between intention and act, between desire and spasm. The poem ends with a prayer that cannot be completed.