Thalaba the Destroyer

Wow. My brain hasn't been this scattered since I read House of Leaves for the first time. The footnotes were so expansive! I think there may be more footnotes than lines... Not only that, but there was another poem in the footnotes to give homage to one line Southey found beautiful enough to reproduce in his own. I do like some of the back history of the things that he discusses in the poem, but I feel he has almost taken some of the magic of his own storytelling away by telling the story again in the footnote. Maybe it is just me being neurotic, but I really dislike being told things twice within moments of each other.
Other thoughts: I enjoyed the details much more than the spoken portions.
I will also say, that after such a journey wading through footnotes and endless tale, I would read the rest of the poem to see how it ends.

Arabesque interesting fact:
Before his untimely death, Muhammad also left behind few indications about how to build proper houses of worship. With little to go on, his successors modeled Moslem holy edifices on Muhammad's house in Medina, the only construction project he'd been associated with in life. Eventually these evolved into Islamic "temples," known today as mosques ("places for prostration"), buildings designed for prayer and meditation, not for any presentation of formal services or ceremonies as in Western churches.
Among the few avenues available to artists in this context, rugs for kneeling on during prayers became a focus of creative activity, and from that was born the Persian rug. Also permitted were decorative prayer niches built into walls directing the faithful to bow toward Mecca as they prayed. But since all realistic images were forbidden in early Islam, none of these could contain images with depictions of anything in the visible world, on the reasoning that making images of animals or humans is to challenge Allah who created all things. The result was a system of ornate but non-realistic designs which Westerners eventually came to call "arabesques" (from the French for "Arabic"), which to this day characterize Arabic art throughout the world.
found here