The view conveyed in the poem's final four lines is that the modern world is spiritually dying or, to put it another way, suffering from despair. The world's ending in a whimper implies that while there may be no physical apocalypse in modern times—no war to end civilization—civilization may come to ruin through its lack of faith. One figurative image that supports this view is the comparison of the hollow men to rats in lines 9 and 33. The rats move quietly, scurrying over broken glass (perhaps the ruins of a modern civilization). If the world were to end in a whimper, rats might well be a remaining species left to scavenge in the