State Hospital, a psychiatric hospital in Orange-
burg, New York, where Solomon spent time as a
patient. The poet’s sympathy with Solomon is
expressed in line 72.
Lines 73 and 74 focus on the poet as inspired
visionary. The Latin reference translates as
‘‘Father Omnipotent Eternal God’’: the implica-
tion is that poetry gives a person the sense of
being close to God. Line 75 portrays the poet as
shamed and rejected by society, conforming only
to the force of creativity. Line 76 links images of
an insane tramp and an angel, suggesting that
they are both aspects of the same poet, outcast
yet divinely inspired. Ginsberg states that poetry
deals with eternal values that outlive any indi-
vidual. The subject of line 77 may be the spirit of
poetry, reincarnate in the modern jazz music
that expresses the suffering of an America in
which love is denied. He likens the saxophone’s
lament to Christ’s words on the cross, which
translate as ‘‘My God, my God, why hast thou
forsaken me?’’ (Mark 15:34). Collecting together
in line 78 the heroes of ‘‘Howl,’’ Ginsberg sees
their lives as poems, which are, however, cut
brutally from their bodies, suggesting that the
poets are sacrificed by a cruel society. The sacri-
ficial imagery foreshadows the figure of Moloch
in part II. Nevertheless, long after they them-
selves are gone, the life-poems of the poets and
artists live on to sustain others.
Part II
LINES 1–7
In his essay ‘‘Notes Written on Finally
Recording ‘Howl,’’’ Ginsberg writes that part II
‘‘names the monster of mental consciousness that
preys on the Lamb.’’ He identifies this monster as
Moloch, who was the sun god of the Canaanites.
Between the eighth and sixth centuriesB.C.E., the
Israelites living near Jerusalem sacrificed their
firstborn children to him. Representations of the
god showed him eating the children. The inspira-
tion for part II came to Ginsberg after he had
taken peyote. He ‘‘saw an image of the robot
skullface of Moloch in the upper stories of a big
hotel glaring into my window’’ (‘‘Notes’’). Moloch
is thus symbolically identified with a mechanized,
dehumanized society that denies sexuality, crea-
tivity, and life itself.
This section opens with Ginsberg asking
which monster consumed the minds and creativ-
ity of the poets and artists commemorated in
part I. The monster is made of hard, industrially
produced aluminum and cement, linking him
with a mechanized, dehumanized society. Gins-
berg answers his own question: the monster is
Moloch. Moloch is identified with loneliness, the
futile pursuit of wealth that underlies capitalism,
and human suffering. He is the harsh judge of
men, the maker of prisons and of wars. Ginsberg
sees the very buildings (perhaps among them, the
skyscraper that carried the vision of Moloch) as
an expression of Moloch’s judgmental nature.
This is a reference to William Blake’s character
of the warlike, repressive, and harshly judgmen-
tal Jehovah figure Urizen, who was (according
to Ginsberg in his annotated edition) the law-
giver as well as the ‘‘creator of spiritual disorder
and political chaos.’’ Urizen was portrayed with
the calipers of the architect of creation, which,
Ginsberg notes, ‘‘limit the infinite universe to his
egoic horizon’’ and ‘‘oppress physical body, feel-
ings and imagination.’’
The windows in line 6 are unseeing because
they do not see humanity’s suffering. Again, the
skyscrapers are identified with a harsh, judgmen-
tal god, this time the Jehovah or God of the Old
Testament, on whom Blake modeled his Urizen.
Moloch has engendered the dehumanizing fac-
tories of the industrialized society and the radio
antennae through which this society broadcasts
its version of reality. In line 7, Moloch is identi-
fied as a lover of oil, which drives the American
economy. Moloch sees artistic genius as mere
poverty. The conclusion of his aspirations is the
hydrogen bomb. The destruction that such
bombs would wreak would purify the world of
the peculiarities chronicled in part I, but at the
price of extinguishing life. The poet emphasizes
that Moloch is merely a mental construct to
which man has sacrificed his soul.LINES 8–15
The poet blames Moloch for his current
lonely and insane state and for denying him the
joy of the body. He asserts that he will abandon
Moloch, and he has a vision of light streaming
from the sky.
At line 10, the poet lists the products of
Moloch: dehumanized apartments, insane asy-
lums, and bombs. The people sacrifice themselves
in service of Moloch, while spiritual values have
vanished from America. The inspirations and
passions that form the basis of a truly humanHowl