We have changed our privacy policy. In addition, we use cookies on our website for various purposes. By continuing on our website, you consent to our use of cookies. You can learn about our practices by reading our privacy policy.

A Memorable Fancy (3) Summary

Get out the microscope, because we’re going through this poem line-by-line.

  • In this section, our speaker visits a printing press in Hell. That sounds like a pretty special field trip.
  • He describes the method of printing he finds there:
  • In the first cave-like room, we have a "dragon-man," cleaning up the trash while other dragons are working on hollowing out the chamber. So far, that's pretty normal.
  • In the next chamber, he sees a snake twisting around a rock while others decorate it with gold, silver, and jewels. What—how else do you expect a printing press to work?
  • The third chamber features "an eagle with wings and feathers of air" (6.4). Got it.
  • The eagle is making this room "infinite," while other "eagle-like men" build palaces on huge cliffs. This all seems just perfectly reasonable.
  • The next room has "lions of flaming fire"—oh my—which are melting metals into liquid (6.5).
  • Chamber five has "unnamed forms" that are pouring the liquid metals into huge casts (6.6.).
  • In the six chamber, this casts take the form of books. Some guys take them and organize them into libraries.
  • And that, Shmoopers, is how Amazon-in-Hell makes its books.
  • After this description, we're told about the Giants who made the world.
  • They were responsible for giving it "its sensual existence," but now it's like they're all chained up—thanks to "weak and tame minds" (6.7).
  • Our speaker divvies up existence into two parts: the Prolific and the Devouring. A helpful way to think of these guys is as the creatively energetic (the Prolific) and the fearfully repressed (the Devouring).
  • Devourers think that the Prolific beings are in chains, but that's just because they (the devourers) don't fully experience life.
  • All the same, the Prolific can only be prolific because the devourers take away "the excess of [their] delights" (6.9).
  • This is a bit confusing, but the idea is that there is a productive, energetic force in humanity (the Prolific) and a restraining, denying force (the Devourer). And it seems that they need each other to exist.
  • If you ask our speaker if God is Prolific, he'll tell you that God only acts in existing beings.
  • Even though they need each other, the speaker says that the Prolific and the Devouring should be enemies.
  • Religion tries to put them both together, but Jesus Christ himself wanted them to be at odds.
  • The last note here is that Satan was once thought to be one of these founding Giant "Energies" (6.14).