These could all be lost kingdoms at this point in the poem, losing their distinction. The lost kingdoms of the poem are death’s kingdom in the valley on the riverbank-death’s other kingdom on the other side, and death’s dream kingdom. Not only are the men hollow, but the valley is also hollow. There is still light in the valley, but no eyes to see it. The "valley of dying stars" suggests the valley of Psalm 23 from the Bible: "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me your rod and your staff, they comfort me.” In Eliot's poem, the stars are dying, but not dead. In this section we return to the repetitive structure from the beginning of sections I and III, and the collective chorus of the hollow men: "The eyes are not here,/There are no eyes here." If there are no eyes there, that means that the hollow men are blind. The end returns to nursery rhyme and then shocks with an ironic anticlimactic statement: the world will end, not with a bang, but "with a whimper." The language of the chorus disintegrates as they attempt to recite the Lord’s Prayer, but become weary. In the antiphony, the "Shadow" of death paralyzes all action. Then, in a parody of a Christian worship service, a priest speaks and a congregation answers in italicized text. The final section begins with a child’s nursery rhyme that has been changed so that the children dance around a cactus. They vacillate between religious faith and despair. This section of the poem describes the desert valley where the blind hollow men gather on the bank of an overflowing river under dying stars.
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