The speaker wants to "wear / Such deliberate disguises / Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves /
The speaker wants to "wear / Such deliberate disguises / Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves / In a field." The setting is a "beach of the tumid river" in a place where "the stone images / Are raised." The fifth section intersperses the line, "Life is very long" from Conrad's novel "An Outcast of the Islands" and fragments of the Lord's Prayer with mentions of an entity which interposes itself "Between the motion and the act." A second Conrad novel supplies one of the two epigraphs, the other one being "A penny for the Old Guy." The world ends with a whimper in, FTP this poem about "shapes without form" circling the prickly pear, written by T. S. Eliot.
The speaker wants to "wear / Such deliberate disguises / Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves /
“The {Hollow Men}”