In first edition of A Vision section ‘Dove or Swan’ contains a relatively long passage on relationship of gyres to contemporary period and near future (AV A 210-215), which was omitted in second edition. It is given here for reference, with page breaks indicated. The first sentence given here (in italics) is last on AV B 300, and text continues from there.

Having bruised their hands upon that limit men, for first time since seventeenth century, see world as an object of contemplation, not as something to be remade, and some few, meeting limit in their special study, even doubt if there is any common experience, that is to say doubt possibility of science.

It is said that at Phase 8 there is always civil war, and at Phase 22 always war, and as this war is always a defeat for those who have conquered, we have repeated wars of Alexander.

I discover already first phase—Phase 23—of last quarter in certain friends of mine, and in writers, poets and sculptors admired by those friends, who have a form of strong love and hate hitherto unknown in arts. It is with them a matter of conscience to live in their own exact instant of time, and they defend their conscience like theologians. They are all absorbed in some technical research to entire exclusion of personal dream. It is as though forms in stone or in their reverie began to move with an energy which is not that of human mind. Very often these forms are mechanical, are as it were mathematical forms that sustain physical primary—I think of work of Mr Wyndham Lewis, his powerful “cacophony of sardine tins,” and of those marble eggs, or objects of burnished steel too drawn up or tapered out to be called eggs, of M. Brancussi [sic], who has gone further than Mr Wyndham Lewis from recognisable subject matter and so from personality; of sculptors who would certainly be rejected as impure by a true sectary of this moment, Scandinavian Milles, Meštrovi? perhaps, masters of a geometrical pattern or rhythm which seems to impose itself wholly from beyond mind, artist “standing outside himself.” I compare them to sculpture or painting where now artist now model imposes his personality. I think especially of art of 21st Phase which was at times so anarchic, Rodin creating his powerful art out of fragments of those Gates of Hell that he had found himself unable to hold together—images out of a personal dream, “the hell of Baudelaire not of Dante,” he had said to Symons. I find at this 23rd Phase which is it is said first where there is hatred of abstract, where intellect turns upon itself, Mr Ezra Pound, Mr Eliot, Mr Joyce, Signor Pirandello, who either eliminate from metaphor poet’s phantasy and substitute a strangeness discovered by historical or contemporary research or who break up logical processes of thought by flooding them with associated ideas or words that seem to drift into mind by chance; or who set side by side as in “Henry IV,” “The Waste Land,” “Ulysses,” physical primary—a lunatic among his keepers, a man fishing behind a gas works, vulgarity of a single Dublin day prolonged through 700 pages—and spiritual primary, delirium, Fisher King, Ulysses’ wandering. It is as though myth and fact, united until exhaustion of Renaissance, have fallen so far apart that man understands for first time rigidity of fact, and calls up, by that very recognition, myth—the Mask—which now but gropes its way out of mind’s dark but will shortly pursue and terrify. In practical life one expects same technical inspiration, doing of this or that not because one would, or should, but because one can, consequent licence, and with those “out of phase” anarchic violence with no sanction in general principles. If there is a violent revolution, and it is last phase where political revolution is possible, dish will be made from what is found in pantry and cook will not open her book. There may be greater ability that hitherto for men will be set free from old restraint, but old intellectual hierarchy gone they will thwart and jostle one another. One tries to discover nature of 24th Phase which will offer peace—perhaps by some generally accepted political or religious action, perhaps by some more profound generalisation—calling up before mind those who speak its thoughts in language of our earlier time. Peguy in his Joan of Arc trilogy displays national and religious tradition of French poor, as he, a man perhaps of 24th phase, would have it, and Claudel in his “L’Otage” religious and secular hierarchies perceived as history. I foresee a time when majority of men will so accept an historical tradition that they will quarrel, not as to who can impose his personality upon others but as to who can best embody common aim, when all personality will seem an impurity—“sentimentality,” “sullenness,” “egotism”—something that revolts not morals alone but good taste.