Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! Nightmare of Moloch!
Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men! Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment!
Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments! Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money!
Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! The first and second parts of Howl are, in a way, a question and an answer. One cannot read the terrible things that happened to real people and not think, " Why were these brilliant thinkers driven to madness? What could make a man jump off a bridge, unloved and alone, before despairing of even the certainty of death?
What could make someone drink themselves to death? What in the name of sanity could drive people to tear their clothes in protest in the streets?
Moloch is the answer to all of these questions, and the others which Ginsberg convinces us to ask as we read Howl , Part I.
In its original incarnation, Moloch was a child-sacrifice-demanding god who would strike fear into worshippers' hearts. It is, then, no surprise that he was the choice to describe the social and industrial machine that Ginsberg believed was devouring his generation. Those intellectuals had done nothing wrong, yet vices and society were killing them. So what, specifically, is Moloch? I encourage anyone who desires to answer that question to read Part II, over and over.
Every word, every sentence, every plea has the essence of the hell the author sees around him. Yet in the chaos, several repeated themes arise. Cold metal and steel crush humanity's individuality, as each worker is forced to sacrifice their own thoughts and minds for the sake of industrial efficiency.
Anyone who has seen Fritz Lang's Metropolis may recall the shock the protagonist, Freder, feels when he witnesses the workers moving precisely in unison to ensure that the gigantic machine, Moloch, continues to run.
The horrifying scene that follows explores the view of an outsider realizing for the first time what workers must sacrifice for the good of humans as a whole: Their own humanity. Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs!
Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities! Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!
But it's not. It consists of three sections. Each of these sections is a prolonged "riff" on a single subject. You could even think of the poem as three enormous run-on sentences. The first section is by far the longest. In the first line of the first section, the speaker tells us that he has been a witness to the destruction of "the best minds" of his generation.
The rest of the section is a detailed description of these people — specifically, who they were and what they did. He doesn't tell us what destroyed them quite yet, though we get plenty of hints. Most lines begin with the word "who" followed by a verb. These are people "who did this, who did that," etc. We quickly learn that these "best minds" were not doctors, lawyers, and scientists. Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo!
Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs!
Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities! Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Allen Ginsberg.
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