Nought is zero, negation. Everything of the previous creation has been dissolved. Only a small core is left. And in that core, something lurks, it is an entity. It doesn’t quite remember the past that has been slain and buried. Only this little entity seems to have survived. The poet doesn’t say exactly an entity, but ‘as though’, as if it is there. This little entity finds itself ‘condemned’, forced against its will, ‘to resume the effort and the pang’, the effort of the last cycle of evolution and the pang of that effort. It had hoped it was all over, but now it is condemned to resume all of it. The previous round was sufficiently frustrating, and this is another ‘frustrate world’ ahead.

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