The last stanza of "The Hollow Men" reads as follows:

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.

The poem reflects the feeling of emotional deadness and shock—or hollowness—that many British people experienced in the aftermath of World War I. They felt nothing inside, or as the poem says, lived in a "shadow" place between "emotion and … response." This is a description of depression and depicts people too stunned or paralyzed to do more than "grope together / and avoid speech" in a "dead" land.

This is the inner, emotional landscape of a society that was once high energy and believed in itself and its values. Now that it has experienced itself betraying its values of civilized behavior, progress, and belief in the protection of life in the bloodbath of World War I, it is unable to move forward.

The "world"—life as the average English person has known it—is ending. Nothing can ever be the way it was because of the deep sense of the war's futility and waste, but this ending is not glorious. To go out with "bang," such as a fireworks display or some other dramatic act would be glorious, but now, all a depressed, lost people can do is "whimper" as their beliefs and society fades.

Anaphora occurs when a poet repeats the beginning words of lines poetry over in consecutive lines. Eliot repeats the entire line "This is the way the world ends" three times. This creates, depending on how you read the poem, a sense of the repetition of a church liturgy or the singsong tone of a nursery rhyme that parodies (makes fun of) religious liturgy. In either case, it sharply focuses our attention on the last line of the poem.