HSC Module B: Band 6 Exemplar Essay [T.S. Eliot]

Hey, I’m Lydia! As someone who really struggled with English in younger years of high school and though I was more inclined towards STEM subjects, but still managed to get a 95 in English Advanced in the HSC, I’ve developed formulas of how to do well in English. 

I know that teachers tell you that formulas are ineffective because they bring no variety to your writing, but that’s only the case when you use only one strict formula. When you know how it all works together and how each part interacts with the other, your writing will become fluid, diverse and sophisticated. 

Especially with Mod B, my formula was: context -> author -> language choices -> meaning. To truly master this module, you must know how to integrate each part into your analysis and move around between them.  

Mod B is really about how the writer translates the various ideas of their time into how they intentionally craft their text. So the most important thing I would say for this unit is to know the context and ideas  really well and even prepare extra you can throw into your essay if the question gets really tricky. 

Here’s the breakdown of an essay I wrote in the 2025 Barker College Trials.

The Essay Question

Modern art rejects nobility and heroism; it confronts the grit of everyday life, reflecting the raw truth of modern existence.
To what extent does this view align with your understanding of Eliot’s poetry?

Through the experimental, avant-garde style characteristic of the oeuvre of his modernist work, Eliot constructs engaging poetic worlds that destabilise my expectation of art as a celebration of notability and heroism, and instead reveals the grit and raw truth of modern existence, confronting the tension between progress and certainty in a world of constant flux. Boldly defying the grandeur represented in Romantic poetry, Eliot’s ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ (1911) encapsulates the fragmentation, destruction and futility of modernity, whereby this moral hollowness is developed in Eliot’s post-War poem ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925), which rejects religion as a heroic and noble solution to the spiritual apathy and emotional turbulence of a humanity shaken by the loss of War. However, Eliot offers tentative hope in ‘Journey of the Magi’ (1927) which is shaped by his own spiritual conversion. Eliot doesn’t dictate that spirituality is the sole source of nobility and heroism in seemingly futile modern existence, but rather suggests that faith can offer hope and stability amongst the grit and raw truth of a secular society. As such by studying the emotional progression of Eliot’s work, I appreciated how modern art does not just celebrate the noble and heroic but also exposes the  raw truth and grit of urban existence. 

By subverting my artistic expectations of a romanticised flaneur’s walk in ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, Eliot disrupts the expectations of the idealised nobility and heroism of modern life with the raw truth, grit and emptiness demonstrated through the poem’s fragmentation of memory and time that symbolises modern man’s ontological disillusionment. As established by Donald J. Childs, in ‘Rhapsody’ “there is no escape from … irrationality, decay and inanimation” encapsulated in the simile of the “street lamps” which “beats like a fatalistic drum” to subvert the expectations of noble emotional passion implied by the title ‘Rhapsody’. Eliot aligns with the philosophy of Henri Bergson’s ideas of how our psyche attempts to escape modernity by embedding ourselves in the past, exemplified by the persona’s anxious and raw psychological chaos between pace of urbanisation and industrialisation and the person’s internal foreboding. Additionally, Eliot encapsulates how even purity of children and the innate heroism in the naivety of youth are stripped away in modernist portrayals, demonstrated the synecdoche of how they “could see nothing behind that child’s eyes” to reduce and dehumanise the nobility of a multifaceted individual to its parts. This subverts the Victorian expectation of the eyes as the windows to the soul, exposing modern life as void; no longer whole, heroic or noble in the raw truth of this existence. The exclamation “memory! You have the key” paradoxically highlights how whilst memory has been the source of the persona’s nostalgia and been a noble escape from modernity, Eliot confronts memory as also being the source of the persona’s psychological disorientation in modern existence. The poem ends surprisingly with Eliot’s gritty judgement in the gruesome rhyming couplet, “sleep, prepare for life … the last twist of the knife” whereby Eliot conflates modern existence with pain. The noble and heroic notion of promised spiritual salvation in the afterlife is completely destabilised, whereby Eliot instead suggests a death defined by the raw truth of modern suffering. This message is reminiscent of today’s gig economy whereby individuals are subject to precarious work and constant availability which perpetrate a similar experience of gritty exhaustion and urban alienation. Hence, by depicting the fragmentation of the experience of memory within the 20th century modernity, Eliot undermines the nobility and heroism of modern existence to foreground the raw truth and disillusionment of urban life. 

Written after the war as a catalyst for great social change, ‘The Hollow Men’, set in a post-Christian purgatory-like world, destabilises my expectation of the nobility and heroism and spiritual renewal that arises from collective suffering and instead, aligning with the religious skepticism prominent in modernist poetry, Eliot suggests modernity defined by the grittiness of spiritual vacuity, psychological isolation and moral decay. In the opening of the poem, Eliot utilises the oxymoronic repetition of “we are the hollow men, we are the stuffed men” to symbolise the insubstantiality, “filled with straw”, the unheroic let down of the assumed nobility and grandeur of religious narratives to fill the emotional void left by the war. Eliot underscores how the hollow men “whisper together” yet their words are "meaningless as wind in dry grass” to delineate the paradoxical togetherness of the hollowmen; they are constantly communicating but do not gain any heroic strength or love love from each other, instead, exposing the raw truth which is the inability to authentically connect in this disillusioned modernity. This is particularly evident in my digital age of social media whereby our constant and instant communication with others doesn’t necessitate genuine care or affection. Additionally, Eliot’s portrayal of modern paralysis is reminiscent of the etherised patient in ‘The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock’ whereby humanity is stuck in existential indecisiveness that hinders man’s ability to nobly communicate. Eliot further reveals the futility of any attempt to communicate through prayer “lips that kiss form prayers to broken stone” whereby the synecdoche demonstrates the the nobility and heroic outcomes associated with the divine is completely stripped, leading into the hollow men’s meaningless chant “this is the way the world ends”. This is anticlimactically followed by the iconic auditory imagery of “not with a bang but a whimper” to emphasise the complete reduction of the heroic and noble qualities of religion, instead presenting it as an unresultive search for existential meaning. Eliot’s bathetic ending thereby demonstrates futility of our innate yearning and hope for the nobility and heroism of religion in the gritty and morally devoid, isolated world. Eliot confronts us with the raw truth that humanity may not culminate in a grand philosophical epiphany but simply and humiliatingly deteriorate into significance.

As opposed to the pessimistic and detached style of his previous works, ‘Journey of the Magi’ offers a tentative hope for the possibility of faith containing heroic and noble qualities to bring salvation to the modern man whilst recognising the raw truth of the struggle and grittiness of the increasingly secular modern existence. The Magi’s dramatic monologue projects Eliot’s own relentless search for meaning as shaped by his alienation from both secular society and his Catholic family after his conversion to Anglicanism in the year ‘Magi’ was written. Eliot appreciates the raw truth that doubt is inherent to faith, represented by the auditory image of “angels singing in my ear saying it was all folly”, but the poet hopes that, like the Magi, after persevering through the doubt, grit and earthly burdens of a modern existence, faith too can be his noble hero, allowing him to finally receive the comfort of salvation. Eliot recognises that the journey “was (you might say) satisfactory” whereby the understated tone progresses his bleak judgement in ‘The Hollow Men’ that the earthly world is godless. Yet, rather than presenting spirituality as an all-encompassing and unrealistic heroic solution to the modern condition, he suggests that religion offers a noble sense of stability amongst the modern world’s constant flux and grit. However, Eliot acknowledges the inherent alienation he feels as a result of his spiritual conversion, utilising the dehumanising image of “alien people clutching their gods” to acknowledge the truth of his alienation due to his spiritual disconnection and disjunction from traditional communities, but nevertheless, Eliot oxymoronically ends with the hope that he would be “glad of another death”. The poet suggests that despite the raw truth of modern existence and the grit of everyday life, he is confident now in ‘Magi’ that there is a heroic and noble promised hope in religion. As such, Eliot does not disregard the burdens of modern life, and the grit of spiritual alienation in a secular modern existence but instead offers a tentative hope for the endurance of faith as a source of heroic and noble stability, reassuring me that faith can persevere in my increasingly doubtful world.

Hence by studying the progression of Eliot’s work, I have gained insight into how an artist’s changing emotional trajectory and attitudes towards faith can profoundly shape their art, whereby Eliot’s modernist art is constantly shaped by his shifting attitudes towards whether the nobility and heroism of spirituality has a role in the disillusionment, raw truth and struggles of a gritty secular world. 

Here is where you should include the why. Why are you studying this? Why is the work relevant and how did the author convey this? You do not need to summarise all the works again, but just conceptually wrap up your essay. And most importantly, go back to the question.

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Written by KIS Academics Tutor for HSC Mathematics, English, Chemistry and Physics, Lydia Hsieh. Lydia is currently studying a Bachelor of Biomedicine/Doctor of Dental Surgery at UniMelb and has received stellar reviews from her past KIS Academics students. You can view Lydia's profile here and request her as a tutor.