Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks!. 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! There are, of course, quite a few lines which support this symbolism: 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. 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 industrial machineĬold 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. Yet in the chaos, several repeated themes arise. Every word, every sentence, every plea has the essence of the hell the author sees around him. I encourage anyone who desires to answer that question to read Part II, over and over.
Those intellectuals had done nothing wrong, yet vices and society were killing them. It is, then, no surprise that he was the choice to describe the social and industrial machine that Ginsberg believed was devouring his generation. In its original incarnation, Moloch was a child-sacrifice-demanding god who would strike fear into worshippers' hearts. Moloch is the answer to all of these questions, and the others which Ginsberg convinces us to ask as we read Howl, Part I. What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? 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?" As Ginsberg himself asks later on, The first and second parts of Howl are, in a way, a question and an answer.
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