Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

THE SECOND COMING  Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. |The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?        W.B. YEATS Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; …. The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. In every crisis they appear, those famous and familiar lines from “The Second Coming,” written in 1919 by W. B. Yeats. Journalists and critics alike seem to take them as final assertions of Yeats’ own beliefs. Such innocent judgments do not ask why those lines open the poem, or for how long their assertions remain asserted. The poem itself has become lost behind the quotability of its opening lines. And Yeats, it seems, wants to be a pundit. In our ready “yes, yes” to those lines, we think we are accepting the judgment of a sage, but by the time we reach the close of the poem — which is a question, not an assertion — we are driven to imagine the changing states of the writer composing this peculiar poem, and we raise questions. What feelings required Yeats to change his bold initial stance, and in what order did those feelings arise? In order to understand this poem, to free it from its ubiquitous misuses, and to restore it to both its opening grandeur and its subsequent humiliation, those are the questions that we must answer.  Yeats was an inveterate reviser of his own ever-laborious writing: recalling his difficulty in composing “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” he confesses, “I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,/ I sought it daily for six weeks or so.” (Mention of that poem in his letters of the time prove this no exaggeration: I counted the weeks.) What was the obstacle suspending his progress? (He spends the poem finding out.) In “Adam’s Curse” he remarks in frustration, “A line will take us hours maybe.” Hours to do what? “To articulate sweet sounds together.” Yeats puts the sequence of sounds first; he composed by ear. Are the resulting sounds always “sweet” in the ordinary sense of the word? Not at all; but they are “sweet” in the internal order of rhythms and styles as the poem evolves. When the poet has articulated its theme, its sounds, and its lines to the best of his powers, the ear registers its satisfaction.   “The Second Coming” is a lurid refutation of the lurid Christian expectations of the Second Coming of Christ, which Jesus himself foretells in Matthew 29-3: Immediately after the distress of those days, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will refuse her light, and the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of heaven will rock; and then the sign of the Son of Man will be seen in heaven; then it is that all the tribes of the land will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming upon the clouds of heaven, with great power and glory. Yeats proposes a surreal alternative to Jesus’ prophecy, proposing that on the Last Day we will see not Christ in majesty but a menacing, pitiless, and coarse beast who “slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.” “After us, the savage god,” Yeats had said as