Emily Dickinson and a Little Bird

 One of the most important and interesting American poets is Emily Dickinson (1830-1886). She wrote nearly 1,800 poems, and only a few were published during her life. Many of her poems render into verse her complex thoughts about love, hope, loneliness, death, and immortality. Her style was unusually terse; she never attempted epics, dramas, or sonnet sequences, like the poets she loved: Shakespeare, Milton Wordsworth and Keats. Yet, her poems pursue emotional and mystical depths with no less profundity than those great poets who preceded her.

Dickinson possessed an extraordinary capacity to devise little tales that her idiosyncratic imagination envisioned. Here is a poem that tells one of those tales:

"A Bird, came down the Walk -" (359)

A Bird, came down the Walk - 
He did not know I saw -
He bit an Angle Worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw, 
 
And then, he drank a Dew
From a convenient Grass -
And then hopped sidewise to the Wall
To let a Beetle pass -
 
He glanced with rapid eyes,
That hurried all abroad -
They looked like frightened Beads, I thought,
He stirred his Velvet Head. - 
 
Like one in danger, Cautious,
I offered him a Crumb,
And he unrolled his feathers, 
And rowed him softer Home -
 
Than Oars divide the Ocean,
Too silver for a seam,
Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon,
Leap, plashless as they swim. 

This disturbingly wonderful poem’s first stanza certainly shocks the reader with its “raw” savagery. The initial line, “A Bird, came down the Walk -” seems quaint and even charming. Then the speaker joins the little drama, “I saw,” as an unseen spectator to the bird’s rapacious murder of the helpless “Angel Worm.” What might not be immediately clear from the first stanza is the speaker’s psychological perspective. Her perspective in this first stanza appears “objective,” as if she were simply observing and reporting factually what she saw.

But a poem by Emily Dickinson is never pure, objective observation. In stanza 2, we see the first evidence of the speaker’s perspective shifting from objective to subjective, to the speaker’s imaginative interpretation of what she sees and feels. The bird is charmingly quaint again, though now that characteristic is attributed to the bird rather than simply inferred by the reader’s natural response to the image of the bird on the “Walk.” After the bird sips the “Dew,” it encounters a “Beetle,” and politely chooses to move aside to “let” the small creature to pass. Through the speaker’s subjective perspective, the bird assumes consciousness and the human principle of etiquette.

As she follows the bird’s movements in stanza 3, the speaker slides from an objective perspective to a fully subjective one. She notes that the bird’s eyes “glance” around “rapid[ly],” but then says, “They looked like frightened Beads, I thought.” Notice the subject/verb that ends this line: “I thought,” and compare it to the subject/verb that ends line 2: “I saw.” At this moment in the poem, Dickinson begins to turn inward, away from the physically visible to the vision within her imagination. As she does so, her language becomes figurative: “They looked like frightened Beads.”

Her inward turn continues and expands through stanzas 3 and 4. In stanza 3, she imagines herself threatened by the bird, “Like one in danger,” and offers him a propitiatory “crumb.” What she expected or hoped for from this gesture is unknowable, but what takes place next is metaphorical and mystical. The bird becomes seemingly ethereal:

And he unrolled his feathers, 
And rowed him softer Home -

Than Oars divide the Ocean,
Too silver for a seam,
Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon,
Leap, plashless as they swim.

The first metaphor and image is the bird unrolling his feathers as his wings open to lift him aloft. Then the speaker sees the bird as an image of a boat rowing through the “Ocean.” Finally, the bird becomes an image of “Butterflies,” silently leaping and swimming, rising through the incorporeal noontime sun. Instead of simply flying away, Dickinson’s metaphors infuse the bird’s flight with an image of an ascension and endow the bird with a metaphysical presence.

Dickinson was influenced by the poetry of Wordsworth and the essays of Emerson. Both of these men found something sublime in nature. For Dickinson, nature is not simply a vehicle for encountering the sublime. Nature is cruel and savage; yet it is also beautiful and transcendent. As with so much of her poetry, Dickinson finds simple contradictions in this world and life and transforms them through figurative language into profound paradoxes.

Emerson's Poem "Uriel"

 Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was an American essayist, poet and philosopher whose essays had a profound effect on 19th and early 20th century American poets including Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost. Each of these poets were influenced by Emerson’s ideas about nature and the individual’s intimate relationship with the physical world.

Today, he is mostly remembered for his essays Nature, Self-Reliance, The American Scholar and The Over-Soul. In the essays Self-Reliance and The American Scholar, Emerson stresses the necessity for American authors to assert their independence from their British predecessors and establish their unique “American” philosophy and voice. In his essay Nature, he espouses his belief that God circulates through every particle of nature and that human beings can achieve a spiritual oneness with nature and thus the universe.

Next to Emerson’s essays, his poems are thought by most critics to be undistinguished. But according to Harold Bloom, “Emerson, after Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, is the most considerable poet of the nineteenth century in the United States. Consequently, his poems should be read alongside his great essays. Among his best poems is Uriel, written in 1845.

The simplest way to start with this poem is by identifying Uriel. Uriel is one the seven archangels and although he is not in the canonical text of the Bible, he appears in the Apocrypha in 2 Esdras 4.1, 36. His name comes from the Hebrew, meaning “God is my flame” or God is my light.” He is also found in Milton’s Paradise Lost as a guide:

“Uriel, for thou of those sev’n spirits that stand
In sight of God's high throne, gloriously bright,
The first art wont his great authentic will
Interpreter through highest Heav'n to bring,
Where all his sons thy embassy attend...

Emerson was strongly influenced by Paradise Lost, and Milton’s characterization of Uriel in that great poem. As the passage from Milton demonstrates, Uriel is an “Interpreter of God’s “authentic will” and an angel who brings that will to other angels. Emerson selects Uriel for his protagonist, since Uriel’s traditional role was that of a prophet and divine teacher. And in Emerson’s poem, it is clear that Uriel is attempting to correct the other angels’ misconceptions regarding the universe. (In the poem, Emerson renames the archangels “young gods.”)

               Uriel

It fell in the ancient periods,
    Which the brooding soul surveys,
Or ever the wild Time coined itself
    Into calendar months and days.
 
This was the lapse of Uriel,
Which in Paradise befell.
Once, among the Pleiads walking,
Sayd overheard the young gods talking;
And the treason, too long pent,
To his ears was evident.
The young deities discuss'd
Laws of form, and metre just,
Orb, quintessence, and sunbeams,
What subsisteth, and what seems.
One, with low tones that decide,
And doubt and reverend use defied,
With a look that solved the sphere,
And stirr'd the devils everywhere,
Gave his sentiment divine
Against the being of a line.
'Line in nature is not found;
Unit and universe are round;
In vain produced, all rays return;
Evil will bless, and ice will burn.'
As Uriel spoke with piercing eye,
A shudder ran around the sky;
The stern old war-gods shook their heads;
The seraphs frown'd from myrtle-beds;
Seem'd to the holy festival
The rash word boded ill to all;
The balance-beam of Fate was bent;
The bounds of good and ill were rent;
Strong Hades could not keep his own,
But all slid to confusion.

A sad self-knowledge withering fell
On the beauty of Uriel;
In heaven once eminent, the god
Withdrew that hour into his cloud;
Whether doom'd to long gyration
In the sea of generation,
Or by knowledge grown too bright
To hit the nerve of feebler sight.
Straightway a forgetting wind
Stole over the celestial kind,
And their lips the secret kept,
If in ashes the fire-seed slept.
But, now and then, truth-speaking things
Shamed the angels' veiling wings;
And, shrilling from the solar course,
Or from fruit of chemic force,
Procession of a soul in matter,
Or the speeding change of water,
Or out of the good of evil born,
Came Uriel's voice of cherub scorn,
And a blush tinged the upper sky,
And the gods shook, they knew not why.

The impetus of Emerson’s poem might have come from a speech to Harvard Divinity School in 1838, which he had attended in 1825. In that address, Emerson incorporated concepts from his essay The Over-Soul, in which he argues that there is a spiritual unity that transcends individuality and a divine presence inherent in all living beings that binds all in unity with the universe. These ideas, in addition to Emerson’s shocking assertion that Jesus is not divine, but a moral prophet, enraged some of the Divinity School professors and other members of the community. As a result of the reaction against his speech, Emerson was not invited to speak at Harvard again until 1869. Perhaps the character Uriel can be read as a Metaphor for Emerson himself and his reaction to those who castigated Emerson for his speech.

As the poem Uriel begins, Emerson establishes the setting. The time is “in the ancient periods,” that is, before time has begun. The place is “Paradise,” simply put, Heaven. There, a certain being, Sayd, (The name for Emerson symbolizes moral and spiritual insight.) is walking about and “overheard the young gods talking”. The young gods are discussing the nature of the universe:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

The young deities discussed
Laws of form, and metre just,
Orb, quintessence, and sunbeams,
What subsiseth, and what seems.

The young gods express confidence in their knowledge. That they “know” and can measure precisely the universe as a foregone conclusion is articulated by the words they use. The past tense of the verb “discussed” denotes conclusively as a matter of fact the entire scope of the universe. They believe they comprehend fully the “Laws of form,” “metre just” “Orbs,” “quintessence,” “sunbeams,” “What subsiseth,” and “What seems.” Then, Uriel enters the discussion “With a look that solved the sphere,” and contradicts the young gods’ assertions, and exposes the mirage of their limited linear thinking and overconfidence by positing that the universe is not so easily summarized. Instead, he submits that what the mind believes it knows is at best a metaphor that can only render the infinite universe as paradox:

Line is nature is not found;
Unit and universe are round;
In vain produced, all rays return;
Evil will bless, and ice will burn

Uriel’s words argue that the universe is ultimately beyond the knowledge of gods and that truth sends “a shudder [that] ran around the sky.” Despite their celestial status, the gods can never fathom the scope of the universe and therefore they are repelled by the limitation Uriel reveals to them. By giving “his sentiment divine / Against the being of a line” Uriel violates the traditionally accepted measurable “formular” that offers solidity and comfort. To the other gods and seraphs, his “word[s]” are “rash,” and they cannot accept them as true, but his truth nevertheless buckles the foundation of the universe:

A shudder ran around the sky;
The stern old war-gods shook their heads;
The seraphs frowned from mytle-beds;
Seemed to the holy festival
The rash word boded ill to all;
The balance-beam of Fate was bent; 
The bounds of good and ill were rent;
Strong Hades could not keep his own,
But all slid to confusion.

Uriel’s truth angers the “stern old gods…and seraphs,” but he himself suffers “A sad self-knowledge” and a “withering.” The poem then enacts the archetypal pattern of the prophet whose truth telling only engenders fearful and bitter reaction. The effect of what Uriel knows and reveals forces him to withdraw into his cloud, forever alienated from the community of other gods. But truth does not wither and withdraw. At first, it is willfully forgotten by the gods:

Straightway, a forgetting wind 
Stole over the celestial kind, 
And their lips the secret kept,
If in ashes the fire-seed slept.

But no matter what the old gods do, the “piercing eye” (insight) of Uriel’s words cannot be suppressed, and their truth will emerge:

But, now and then, truth-speaking things
Shamed the angels' veiling wings;
And, shrilling from the solar course,
Or from fruit of chemic force,
Procession of a soul in matter,
Or the speeding change of water,
Or out of the good of evil born,
Came Uriel's voice of cherub scorn,
And a blush tinged the upper sky,
And the gods shook, they knew not why.

Uriel’s words threatened the other gods because secure in their linear understanding they could not endure “Knowledge grown too bright” for their “feebler sight.” Or put another way, the young gods had become mired in unquestioning, doctrinal conformity.

Postscript:

Emerson’s poem grapples with the universe until he subdues and possesses it in his imagination. That creative struggle that unfolded in Emerson’s mind germinated into the poem. Regardless of what one believes, Emerson’s poem is a creative force for our imaginations to reckon with.

Today, we have a contemporary creative force evolving in the form of A. I. Its unique power is being touted as “transformational technology,” and “promises to reshape our current society through breakthroughs in medicine, productivity, and convenience.” In an area such as medicine, this rapidly burgeoning technology should be welcomed. But it is apparent that its rapid growth needs serious and sensible regulation by our government. Yet, the government (Trump) fears oversight would cede to China the A. I. tech race.

In his recent piece in The New Times, Thoman Friedman discussed how humans have become akin to the biblical God by creating an intelligent and sentient life—A. I. That omniscient God “created” beings with intelligence that is finite; humans have endowed A. I. with an intelligence that may be infinite, or infinitely greater than theirs. In creating artificial intelligence, have we transgressed foolishly as when Adam and Eve did when they too tried to become like gods, tasting the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?

That ye should be as Gods, since I as Man, 
Internal Man, is but proportion meet,
I of brute human, yee of human Gods.
So ye shall die perhaps, by putting off
Human, to put on Gods, death to be wisht,
Though threat'nd, which no worse then this can bring. 
And what are Gods that Man may not become
As they, participating God-like food?  PL Book 9, 710-716

Later in Milton’s epic, Adam and Eve are told by the archangel Gabriel that their sin will one day be forgiven and their progeny, on whom their sin brought death, will be redeemed. Out of their transgression will come good through the sacrifice of God’s son. Emerson had Milton’s poem in mind when he wrote the paradox of Uriel’s words, “Evil will bless, and ice will burn.” That a blessing will rise from evil echoes Milton’s Paradise Lost and the New Testament’s promise. A. I. makes no such promise; instead, it augurs dangerous, faceless “intelligence” that will view us as indifferently and we do ants.

Bright Star

In his Ode to a Nightingale, John Keats (1795-1821) hears the bird’s immortal song descending to him through the ages and pines for the immortality the song symbolizes:

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
  No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
  In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
  Through the sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home,
    She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
         The same that oft-times hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
  Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Keats’s English sonnet, Bright Star, initially composed sometime between February and December of 1819, was written for Fanny Brawne to whom Keats was engaged. It also meditates on immortality, this time employing symbolism of the North Star. Certain words and images of the poem are present in an earlier letter (June 25, 1818) he wrote to his brother Tom while he toured Lake Windermere in the Lake District of northern England: “The two views [of the lake], we have had of it are the most noble tenderness—they can never fade away…[they] refine one’s sensual vision into a sort of north star which one can never cease to be open-lidded and steadfast over the wonders of the great powers.” As Keats traveled to Italy in the autumn of 1820, in an attempt to restore his failing health, he revised the sonnet and wrote it into his copy of Shakespeare’s poems. It has been suggested that it is the last poem Keats wrote before his death February 23, 1821.

Bright Star, Would I Were Steadfast as Thou art

Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art--
  Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
  Like nature's patient, sleepless eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
  Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
  Of snow upon the mountains and the moors;
No--yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
  Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft swell and fall,
  Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
and so live ever--or else swoon to death.

The sonnet begins with a typical Keatsian idea, the desire to escape mortality. Keats’s normal longing for “permanence” was intensified by the death of his brother Tom, whom he cared for during his final illness and death from tuberculosis December 1, 1818. As Keats works through his thought process in the poem, we see an initial statement expressing his wish. Keats gazes on the north star and desires to also have the eternity the star represents: Bright Star! would I were steadfast as thou art-” But the moment that thought settles in the reader’s mind, Keats counters it with an essential, emotional qualification, “No.” The star watches in “lone splendor,” isolated like a hermit. It may be constant,” a state of being for which Keats yearns, but without the possibility of the joy of human passion and love.

In the sestet, Keats shifts from the “star” image in the octave to an image of the lovers in one another’s arms in the sestet:

 No--yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
  Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft swell and fall,
  Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
and so live ever--or else swoon to death.

Here, Keats rises and falls in an imaginative and realistic pattern. First, he pictures his head “Pillow’d upon my love’s ripening breast” quieting his fears about mortality as he feels the “soft swell and fall” and listens to “her tender-taken breath”. Momentarily, he conjectures he can “live-[for]ever,” but the thought vanishes immediately and life’s gravity pulls him downward “to swoon to death.” Passion and love ease Keats’s anxiety but cannot dispel the weight of reality, though his poem defies time’s “fell hand.”

Auden on Yeats

In January 1939 William Butler Yeats died. The New Times ran an obituary acknowledging Yeats’s death, noting that “it will be for his verse that posterity will remember him.” One such remembrance was published by English poet W. H. Auden (1907-1973) in 1940, In Memory of W. B. Yeats in 1940. His elegy considers the nature of death, the enduring effect of poetry, and the poet’s relationship to society.

        In Memory of W. B. Yeats
                             I

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

 

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

 

III

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

The poem is organized into three sections. Part 1, stanza 1 offers a matter of fact, detached tone. The lines unfold with “cold,” meteorological precision and facts—"dead of winter”, “brooks were frozen.” At first glance, Auden’s language suggests the world’s indifference to Yeats’s death, but when taken together with the images of the “snow disfigured the public statues,” the “mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day” and the personification of “What instruments we have agree / The day of his death was a dark cold day”, the seeming indifference of the world recedes behind stringently potent and poignant loss and grief.

The rest of Part I meanders through nature, Yeats’s body and mind, cities, and finally the future. Somewhere far from his hospital room, nature continued as “wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,” and “The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays”. While the natural course of life and death proceeded, as the “provinces of his body revolted,” elsewhere the poet’s poetry escaped mortality: “By mourning tongues / The death of the poet was kept from his poems.” The death of the poet frees his poetry from the singular authority of the man, and “he became his admirers.”

In stanza 4, Auden continues to view Yeats’s poetry extracted from his personality and his poetic reputation and legacy “scattered among a hundred cities” as it is read and judged for its worth by “a foreign code of conscience” and “modified in the guts of the living.” He then imagines in the next stanza that Yeats’s death will go unnoticed in the “importance and noise of tomorrow,” and by the millions who will chase riches, endure “sufferings,” and “convince” themselves of their “freedom.” Apart from those indifferent many, a “few thousand will think of this day / As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.” This understatement muffles grief and the last two lines of the stanza bring us back to stanza 1 and the “dark cold” void that Yeats’s death leaves Auden with: “What instruments we have agree / The day of his death was a dark cold day.”

In the shorter section Part II of the poem, Auden shifts his perspective, adopts a familiar tone with the second personal pronoun “You.” He tells us Yeats was “silly like us,” like Auden and other poets—overly sensitive, introspective, imaginative, and declares Yeats’s “gift,” (poetry) will “survive” his mortality. He sums up the grist for Yeats’s poetic imagination— “the parish of rich women, physical decay, / Yourself mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.” Auden then poses the paradoxical effect poetry possesses: “Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, / For poetry makes nothing happen.” The four words, “poetry makes nothing happen,” are often quoted to argue the uselessness of poetry. But the lines that follow hinge on the verb “survives,” drawing out the true value of poetry’s numinous resonance in the human imagination, an art that endures through time. The poet dies, but Poetry is imperishable.

Part III, Auden assumes the tone of formal elegy, in which he changes the structure into a brief, lamenting address inviting the “Earth” to “receive an honored guest; / William Yeats is laid to rest; / Let the Irish vessel lie / Emptied of its poetry.” Then he shifts ominously to the political reality confronting Europe as Hitler’s armies began it conquest of the continent:

Earth, receive an honored guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.                                                                                               

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate; 

As Auden is writing his tribute in February 1939, with World War II approaching fast, he asks for Yeats’s poems to “persuade” humanity “to rejoice” in spite of the dark political time.  His request is a tenuous cry for the honesty of art to enable men to confront the “Intellectual disgrace,” that has permitted the rise of fascism. Of course, his entreaty could never forestall what was coming. However, his desire for Yeats’s poetry to “Sing of human unsuccess / In a rapture of distress;” and to “Teach the free man how to praise” should continue to call to us today, that within poetry (especially Yeats’s), there is possibility for human being to find hope for the future if we allow poetry to enter our lives.

Claude and Yeats

It seems that a week cannot pass without some story in the news that expresses concern about Artificial Intelligence. Yesterday 8/8/26, an essay in The Guardian by Kathrine Rundell, “Why I Hate What A.I. Is Doing to The Mind and Happiness of The Young” describes the harm A.I. is already inflicting on students in schools and universities. Her opening paragraph highlights the political danger this innovation could impose:

“If you set out to design from scratch a tool to facilitate authoritarian rule, it would look exactly like AI. You would cherish it for its ability to destabilise our shared reality and its creation of disinformation on a scale unprecedented in human history. With it you need no armies of typists and artists to spread your propaganda. It can enable mass surveillance and thereby put shackles on those who seek to resist you. Its lethal autonomous weapons systems can perfect and normalise remote killing. It will turbocharge inequality; it is already facilitating a breathtaking shift of power and wealth from the hands of the many to the hands of a tiny number of men who – to put it in terms for which I can’t be sued – seem to hold dangerously damaged views about the value and dignity of human life”

The claims she makes are not hyperbole or new. In 2023, Elon Musk stated that A.I. “has the potential of civilization destruction” and called for a six month pause in its development. Musk has modified his view and believes A.I. will likely lead to economic abundance and unlimited leisure time for humanity. So, even if A.I. might pose a risk, it also could offer untold benefits and therefore his “message” is one of optimism. But Rundell’s persuasive argument, along with an MIT study citing the risks from A.I., articles reporting A.I. escaping human control, and the godfather of A.I. Geoffrey Hinton warning that A.I. could lead to human extinction, should wake up everyone to the danger that might be approaching.

One A.I. investor has assured the world that not only are fears about A.I. overblown, but A.I. will be the greatest benefit humanity has ever experienced. In his June 6, 2023, post, venture capitalist and former software engineer Marc Andressenn of Silicon Valley dismisses the notion that Artificial Intelligence poses any threat and proclaims that it will save the world:

“The era of Artificial Intelligence is here, and boy are people freaking out.

Fortunately, I am here to bring the good news: AI will not destroy the world, and in fact may save it.”

Judging from the evangelical enthusiasm of his opening sentences, Andreessen comes across as a true believer in the beneficial potential of A.I. In fact, he offers with prophetic confidence several examples of what A.I. has in store for us. Two such examples are:

“Every child will have an AI tutor that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, infinitely helpful. The AI tutor will be by each child’s side every step of their [sic] development, helping them maximize their potential with the machine version of infinite love.”

“Every person will have an AI assistant/coach/mentor/trainer/advisor/therapist that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, and infinitely helpful. The AI assistant will be present through all of life’s opportunities and challenges, maximizing every person’s outcomes.”

This vision is utopian fantasy and quite creepy.

Will Artificial Intelligence bring on the apocalypse as predicted by the very men who created it? Or will it usher in the Edenic abundance Musk thinks it will?

A poem that is too frequently exploited to prophesy apocalyptic visions but, in this case, apropos to what might be coming is Yeats’s The Second Coming.

              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?

“The Second Coming” was written in1919. On Yeats’s mind at the time was the horrific slaughter of WW I, the murderous violence of the Russian Revolution and the indiscriminate bloodshed of the Irish war for independence. These events and Yeats’s curious philosophy regarding the cycles of human history forged in his imagination the imagery and symbolism of the poem. The first line, “Turning and turning in a widening gyre” introduces the symbolic cone shaped figure that depicts the geometric rendering of Yeats’s vision of historical epochs. Yeats viewed the course of history as two interpenetrating “gyres”—cones:

Each one symbolizes a two-thousand-year epoch of human history. As the twentieth century moved forward, Yeats believed that the two-thousand-year Christian cycle was ending and its opposite or antithetical historical period was beginning. Though Yeats knew the history of the Christian era was particularly bloody, he felt the era about to supersede it was even more terrifying.

The terrifying reality foreseen is laid out in the poem in two distinct stanzas, the first eight lines long and the second fourteen. After the symbolic gyre in stanza 1, Yeats introduces in line 2 a metaphor suggesting loss of control: “The falcon cannot hear the falconer.” Then, a succession of metaphors follows that, though frightening, seem rather abstract:

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.   

These abstract metaphors quickly give way to the menacing images that rise up in the next fourteen lines. And the speaker slides from an objective tone to a subjective, personal one. Lines 9, 10 and 11 pulsate with fear as Yeats repeats words and phrases:

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming!

That fear is manifestly justified “When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi / Troubles my sight.” “Spiritus Mundi” is ‘spirit of the world’ an idea of the collective soul and cultural memories from all societies. From this storehouse of memories comes not the return of Christ; instead, “A shape with lion body and the head of a man, / A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun” appears. This image of a sphinx, dormant for “twenty centuries of stony sleep,” is a beast coming to replace the Christian God. The image suggests a return of pagan gods, perhaps Egyptian ones. But Yeats obscures what it is by ending the poem with a question:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

All he knows, “but now I know,” is “some rough beat” that will no doubt endanger humanity is approaching and there is nothing that can stop its progress. The same can be said for A.I. As for the A.I. cheerleaders above, they should read carefully and consider Yeats's awesome poem.

Milton "On His Blindness"

 John Milton (1608-1674) believed from an early age that he would become a great poet. He graduated from Cambridge University in 1629 and afterward continued to study for six year and travel through Europe to enhance his poetic ambition. He had written several shorter poems of exceptional quality by 1650 but had not yet written his great epic Paradise Lost, the poem that would elevate him in the canon of world literature alongside the greatest poets of western civilization. He also wrote many essays on such subjects as the freedom of the press, the monarchy, and the Church of England. However, by 1652 Milton had become completely blind. With the assistance of his daughters and scribes, he would overcome this handicap years later with their help, but before he did, he wondered how God could expect him to perform this one special talent given to him by the Almighty. In his poem, When I consider how my light is spent, Milton ponders the justice of being given this “talent” by God but being rendered incapable of fulfilling it:

When I consider how my light is spent

When I consider how my light is spent
Ere have my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodged within me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide,
"Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?"
I fondly ask.  But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best: his state
Is kingly.  Thousands at his bidding speed,
And post o'er land and oceans without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait."

The reader should notice at the outset that Milton’s poem is a Petrarchan sonnet. This sonnet form presents an issue or problem in the first eight lines (the octave), then in line 9 of a Petrarchan sonnet begins the sestet which turns from problem to resolution. In the octave, Milton considers that since he is now blind, “my light is spent,” and “that one talent which is death to hide” is “lodged within me useless,” how can he be expected to “present / My true account,” fulfill his “one talent which is death to hide”? As we read through these lines, we sense an anger surfacing through the words. It is not only that he has suffered a terrible affliction, but that affliction struck him before half his life was over and, more importantly, before he achieved his ambition to compose truly great poetry: “Ere half my days in this dark world and wide.” Now God will “chide” him for his failure even though the means of employing “that one talent” has been stolen from him. And so, he asks, “Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”

As a faithful Puritan, Milton knows his duty is to accept whatever challenges or adversities God sends his way. So, in the sestet, Milton offers a resolution. Or seems to. The resolution actually begins prematurely in the middle of line 8 when “Patience” cautions him: “But Patience, to prevent / That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need / Either man’s work or his own gifts[.]” In these lines, you again might hear resentment as the words of the octave still linger in one’s mind. If God does not need man’s “gifts,” then why would he “chide” him when man becomes bereft of the capacity to offer them up to him. They are followed by Patience’s admonition that he who bears “his mild yoke, they serve him best: his state / Is kingly.” The word “mild” strikes the reader as ironic and the clause “his state / Is kingly” as excessively compensatory. The sestet ends with a balanced, philosophical definition of true service to God:

...Thousands at his bidding speed,
and post o'er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait

Given Milton’s condition, it seems that he could not do much more than become inactive and “stand and wait” though waiting and enduring idly someone such as Milton could withstand. The sonnet suggests that may not be the case, especially when the reader recalls the present verb tenses in the poem, which denote that Milton questioning of God is not a statement from the past but one that is regularly repeated, “When I consider (each time) and that the words “one talent which is death to hide” alludes to the Parable of the Talents in Matthew 25:14-30 in which a servant is punished for not employing the “talents” his master had given him: “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

At 43 years old and blind, Milton peered into the future and “saw” a bleak, unproductive time after which he would be harshly judged by God for idly awaiting the end of his life. He must have been despondent and terrified with what he believed awaited him. Fortunately for him and us, there were those who not only believed in his prodigious talent but also were able to wait patiently, listen to his dictation and transcribe his words for posterity. Some might assert that this sonnet demonstrates Milton’s unshakeable faith and patient submission to God’s will. I did when I first read the poem many years ago, but these days I also hear anger and impatience rising from the page.

Wordsworth Westminster Bridge

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was a poet profoundly affected by nature. He was not only struck by its beauty, but also felt a deep, spiritual presence permeating trees, hills, valleys and rivers which one’s imagination could possess and later experience as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions recollected in tranquility.” For him, nature was a divine teacher through which human beings could attain a deep moral communion as he demonstrates in these lines from his poem Tintern Abbey.

                                 These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration: — feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened: — that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on, —
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
                                                    (23-49)

Living on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution, Wordsworth saw the incipient damage and dislocation the Revolution was having on society. London was becoming intensely urbanized as the population exploded and factories expanded across the city. From Tintern Abbey, one might sense that he clearly would prefer to live beyond the “din” of city life and reside in the quiet rural countryside surrounded by nature. He reinforces this notion in the opening of his epic, autobiographical poem The Prelude (1805), when he greets nature’s “gentle breeze” as he escapes the confines of the city:

Book First Introduction:
Childhood and School-time

OH, there is blessing in this gentle breeze,
That blows from the green fields and from the clouds
And from the sky; it beats against my cheek,
And seems half conscious of the joy it gives.
O welcome messenger! O welcome friend!
A captive greets thee, coming from a house
Of bondage, from yon city’s walls set free,
A prison where he hath been long immured.
Now I am free, enfranchised and at large,
May fix my habitation where I will.
What dwelling shall receive me, in what vale
Shall be my harbour, underneath what grove
Shall I take up my home, and what sweet stream
Shall with its murmurs lull me to my rest?
The earth is all before me—with a heart
Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty,
I look about, and should the guide I chuse
Be nothing better than a wandering cloud
I cannot miss my way. I breathe again—
Trances of thought and mountings of the mind
Come fast upon me. It is shaken off,
As by miraculous gift ’tis shaken off,
That burthen of my own unnatural self,
The heavy weight of many a weary day
Not mine, and such as were not made for me.
Long months of peace—if such bold word accord
With any promises of human life—
Long months of ease and undisturbed delight
Are mine in prospect. Whither shall I turn,
By road or pathway, or through open field,
Or shall a twig or any floating thing
Upon the river point me out my course?
                                                                 (1. 1-30)

On another occasion, Wordsworth saw a very different London, one dressed in beauty and “majesty.” This London appears in his Petrarchan sonnet Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802.

Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, 
September 3, 1802

Earth has not any thing to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

In this poem Wordsworth is able to transform the ills of the city by comparing it to nature. The “City” is personified, clothed in the “The beauty of the morning.” Its “Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples, lie / Open unto the fields, and to the sky.” The city, illuminated in the morning sunlight, fills Wordsworth with a “calm so deep!”— a serenity akin to what he experiences in nature. Wordsworth transforms the city into a sublime vision not unlike what the reader encounters in the language of Tintern Abbey.

This poem illustrates what is essential for readers to fully appreciate Wordsworth’s poetry. If one thinks Wordsworth is just a “poet of nature,” and that the phrase “poet of nature” defines his work, one would be only partially right. Clearly, Wordsworth believed nature could be a spiritual guide that could teach morality and humility and connect humans with the Divine. Westminster Bridge demonstrates how the power of poetic imagination also can shape one’s perception of the world, enabling one to see transcendent beauty.