Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.

Travel

The motif of travel preoccupies the speaker of “Howl” from the very beginning. Already in the poem’s second line, the speaker invokes a bum-like figure who wanders the urban environment on a quest, “dragging themselves” through the streets and “looking for an angry fix.” The figure mentioned here is specifically on a quest for drugs. By contrast, other travelers who appear throughout the poem are on something more like a spirit quest, searching for higher meaning or truth. Often, these searches are accompanied—or perhaps facilitated—by hallucinogenic drug “trips.” For example, consider the journey across New York City described in line 14:

   who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo

Alternatively, consider the journey across the country mentioned in line 60:

   who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity

In both examples, the motif of the journey features the desire for a destination in some higher plane of reality—whether that’s a “holy Bronx” or a “vision to find out Eternity.” These and other examples of traveling and wandering in the poem may be interpreted as having some relation to the notion of a spirit quest.

Mysticism and Theology

The speaker of “Howl” demonstrates an ongoing fascination with matters both mystical and theological. He alerts us readers to this fascination early in the poem. He does so, for instance, in his reference to “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection” (line 3). Mystic visions and theological references continue to appear with great frequency throughout the first and second parts of the poem. At times, the speaker simply makes passing references to significant historical figures and concepts. He does this, for instance, in line 24:

   who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kaballah [sic] because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas

Here, the speaker briefly references three influential visionaries in the disciplines of philosophy (Plotinus), literature (Edgar Allan Poe), and theology (St. John of the Cross). He also playfully coins the concept “bop kaballah,” which brings together a major jazz form of the 1940s (bop) and a mystical tradition for the interpretation of Hebrew scriptures (Kabbalah). Elsewhere, the speaker engages directly in mystic visions, as when he describes those “who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated” (5). Taken together, the speaker’s many invocations of mysticism and theology point to a desire for some higher mode of meaning or truth.

Descent

Just as “Howl” frequently references the desire to ascend to a higher plane of existence, the poem also offers many examples of descent into degradation. At some points, this descent is literal and physical. Lines 57 and 58, for instance, both tell of physical acts of plunging. Line 57 describes the act of someone who “jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge . . . and walked away unknown and forgotten.” Line 58 takes the motif of descent even further, narrating several plunges in quick succession:

   who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic. . . 

This series of physical plunges evokes a range of emotional states related to descent, including despair, carelessness, suicidality, and hate. The evocation of these states leads us to a consideration of the poem’s more general concern with figurative rather than literal descents into isolation, desperation, and ultimately madness. This concern becomes clear when we consider the structure of the poem as a whole, and particularly the way it’s bookended with references to madness. Just as the poem opens with a hellish vision of descent into “madness, starving hysterical naked” (line 1), it concludes with an extended address to a man incarcerated in a psychiatric institute, “where there are twenty five thousand mad comrades all together singing” (line 125).