"For what was creation if not a mechanism in a forge, a tool that allowed life to be a certain way, to form itself into the shapes intended by the creator, the smith, to act out the will intended?"

Sauron really is the anti-Aulë, isn't he! One longs to create beings that can learn from him and that he can love, requiring that they have wills apart from his. The other eventually is subsumed into the desire to force others into merging into his own will.

Though with the sense that he only partly sees what he is doing:

Now came the wonder. Now came the beauty.

Alas, no.