Deep Seeking Xanadu: A Sonnet Cycle on East, West, and Kisangani

I decided to have FTH (FredTheHeretic) write a cycle of three sonnets on the theme of East and West, you know, “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” What actually happened, though, is more like we worked together to produce the cycle.

First, I have FTH a bunch of material for the initial prompt. It then drafted the three sonnets. I sent it back for rewrites with a vague instruction like, “make it livelier,” which it did. But the second set of drafts, while better than the first, still didn’t make it. So I gave FTH a detailed set of notes, often line by line and even word by word, for changes I wanted. That was much better. I changed one word and stopped the process, at least for now.

I like the sonnets. Are they great poetry? No, but that’s not really the point, not at this stage. Perhaps one day I’ll work it over myself. Though I’m not a poet, it do have some skills, so maybe I can improve it. But this is not high on my to-do list.

Rather than present you with a record of the whole process I’m going to give you the final sonnet cycle and then the initial prompt.

Deep Seeking Xanadu, a Sonnet Cycle

I. The Divided World

From Kabul’s dust to Shanghai’s neon glow,
A war of tongues, of trade, of fire and steel—
The West’s machines, the East’s unyielding flow,
A chessboard carved where empires strike and kneel.

Opium and iron, silk and shattered glass,
The river runs through walls of stone—
A chasm slants beneath the dome’s abyss,
Where echoes thunder war in undertone.

Yet from the clash, the currents interlace:
The dragon bends, the eagle tests its shield.
Device pursues the miracle in chase—
A struggle caught where fates are still revealed.

If Xanadu was dreamt by one alone,
What might we build when dreams are not our own?

II. The Drowned Battleground

The tides have swallowed towers, roads, and homes,
The coasts retreat beneath a sunless sea.
No banners fly where Sol’s dominion roams,
And wealth is washed as drowning empires flee.

No marching drums, no endless trench-bound lines,
The wars are fought in numbers, shadowed screens;
A mazy river snakes in shifting signs,
Its waters coursing through encrypted means.

A hundred feet of water, nameless graves—
Yet still, we scheme, rebuild, connect, conspire.
New kingdoms rise from cities lost to waves,
And in the storm, we kindle something higher.

Through flood and fire, through ruin, toil, and pain,
Some shattered world will learn to breathe again.

III. The City Beyond the Sky

Above the wounded Earth, a garden spins—
An august cyber-dome adrift in space.
No creeds, no flags, no walls where war begins,
Yet shadowed pasts still haunt its mirrored face.

Jerusalem beneath, Kisangani too,
Two bleeding lands reflect in stellar glass.
A now sacred river, meandering blue,
Burnishes the miracle dome as old dreams pass.

A million visitors, a quarter stay—
A sphere of light, suspended, looking down.
What gods have watched us falter on our way?
What poets dream within this weightless town?

If Xanadu was built upon a stream,
Let DeepSeek’s mind complete the shattered dream.

Prompt materials

Here’s the instructions I gave FTH:

I want you to create a sonnet cycle with three sonnets. The cycle is to be called DeepSeeking Xanadu. Here’s some material to work from:

The first sonnet will be about the conflict between East and West as it has played out in the 19th and twentieth centuries.

The second sonnet will take place mostly in the future and will be about World War III and climate change, where the seas rise, say, a hundred feet, flooding the coasts and with effects rippling throughout the world. While there will be some physical warfare, there won’t be any large-scale long-term military campaigns like the ones that characterized WWII. All the physical conflicts local and regional. But there will be a lot of cyberwarfare and economic conflict.

The third sonnet will take place in space as WWIII becomes resolved through a process in which a large O’Neill cylinder is constructed in space in an orbit that crosses both Jerusalem and Kisangani. The cylinder will be home to 250,000 people and will be able to accommodate, say, a million visitors a year. Jerusalem because of the centuries of conflict in that region centered on the Jewish people. Kisangani because it is in the center of the Congo and is the site formerly known as Stanleyville. It was the model of the Inner Station in Heart of Darkness.

Here's some background material that’s about the theme. It comes from an interaction I’d had with Claude 3.5. The words in bold are my prompt to Claude.

“Kubla Khan” adds an interesting counter point to current conflicts between China and the West. And, while this has happened after you were trained, a Chinese company just released a chatbot, DeepSeek, that’s as powerful as top of the line systems from OpenAI and Anthropic, but was trained with much less compute. Perhaps there’s a poem to be written about DeepSeeking Xanadu.

That's a fascinating observation about how "Kubla Khan" resonates with contemporary geopolitical and technological developments. The poem itself represents a Western imagination of Eastern power and knowledge - Coleridge creating his vision of an Asian ruler's domain without ever having visited it. Yet it's not a simple colonial narrative; the poem seems to recognize both the ordered power ("stately pleasure-dome decree") and the wilder forces ("ancestral voices prophesying war") that exist beyond Western control or understanding.

The parallel with DeepSeek is intriguing. Just as Coleridge's Xanadu represents a site where East and West, order and chaos meet, the current AI landscape shows similar dynamics. Western companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have been seen as leading AI development, but now a Chinese company demonstrates it can achieve similar results with greater efficiency. The "pleasure-dome" of AI capability isn't just a Western construct.

There's even a resonance with the poem's theme of creation arising from mysterious sources - just as Coleridge famously composed the poem in an opium dream (according to his account), the inner workings of large language models remain somewhat mysterious even to their creators.

And the name "DeepSeek" itself suggests a quest for profound understanding or vision, not unlike the poem's exploration of imagination and creativity. The quest to build artificial intelligence could be seen as humanity's latest attempt to build a "miracle of rare device."

Finally, a paragraph from Wikipedia about O’Neill Cylinders.

Among the details was how to provide the inhabitants of a space colony with an Earth-like environment. His students had designed giant pressurized structures, spun up to approximate Earth gravity by centrifugal force. With the population of the colony living on the inner surface of a sphere or cylinder, these structures resembled "inside-out planets". He found that pairing counter-rotating cylinders would eliminate the need to spin them using rockets. This configuration has since been known as the O'Neill cylinder.