Toward a Biophysics of Poetry

My long-term interest in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” (KK) is shadowed by an interest in “This Line-Tree Bower My Prison,” (LTB) which is one of the so-called Conversation poems. I compared the two in a working paper from 2013, STC, Poetic Form, and a Glimpse of the Mind, noting that they have several motifs in common but are utterly different poems. Thus (pp. 41-42):

LTB’s trajectory is a first-person narrative; we follow the perceptions, thoughts, and feelings of the poet as they occur to him, one after the other. We are presented with a cleanly identified authorial consciousness shifting its attention here and there about the world in a coherent way. The passage of time is explicitly marked and noted within the poem itself. In this poem Coleridge’s verse technique emphasizes temporal continuity. By placing major attention shifts in the middle of the line Coleridge emphasizes an underlying continuity of consciousness: one’s gaze has a new focus, it is still one’s gaze. By running clauses across line boundaries, the repetitive recurrence of line ends is muted. The temporal course of the poetic act itself is muted so as to “dissolve” into the virtual time depicted in the poem.

KK is different; it lacks a narrative frame. Thus it cannot register either narrative movement or a self that experiences such movement. Things and scenes are juxtaposed in a way that is sometimes hard to grasp. Yet, as we have seen, there is a rigorous logic to the poem. At the same time it has an elaborate rhyme scheme and other sound features as well. What has this to do with its “ontological” semantic trajectory?

I suggest that the confluence between sound and sense in “Kubla Khan” is, in effect, a surrogate for the lack of a narrative frame, and hence the impossibility of a narrative trajectory. The key point is that rhyme adds an element of predictability to the verse; one knows that sounds will repeat at regular intervals and so can anticipate them. Thus the predictability that has been “lost” because the poem does not have a narrative flow is “restored” or “compensated for” though elaborate rhyme. The temporal structure of the poem itself becomes the frame for its semantic trajectory.

In the course of discussing these matters with ChatGPT 5.2 we arrived a what might be called a biophysics of poetry. I issued the following prompt:

I want to return to the difference in prosody practice in KK and LTB. I think that is (potentially) VERY deep. That there seems to be a trade-off between conceptual continuity (temporal succession vs. ontological transition from state to state) and sonic patterning (simple vs. elaborate versification), that strikes me as something very deep about how the nervous system functions. It has something to do with the physical nature of the system. We may not be able to figure it out on the basis of formal design considerations but will need to know specifics about physical structure and processes.

Yes—this is very deep, and I think you’re now pointing to something that sits below poetics, below cognition-as-symbol-processing, and squarely in the physics of nervous systems.

What you’re intuiting is not just a stylistic correlation, but a trade-off between two kinds of coherence that any physically realized information-processing system has to manage.

The discussion went on from there. I asked ChatGPT to summarize the discussion, after which we went on to develop experimental tests of the idea. I have placed ChatGPT’s summary below; the experimental tests will have to wait for another post.

Toward a Biophysics of Poetry

What if poetic form is not primarily a matter of meaning, symbolism, or interpretation—but of dynamical stability in the nervous system?

That is the direction our recent discussion has taken us: toward something like a biophysics of poetry. By this I mean an account of poetry grounded in timing, energy, alignment, and coherence—constraints that arise because poems must run on human (and perhaps artificial) neural systems.

Poetry as computation in time

A useful starting point is the idea that a linguistic string—a poem, sentence, or speech—is a one-dimensional projection of a path through a high-dimensional semantic and neural space. Meaning is not stored in the string itself; it is reconstructed as the reader (or listener) traverses that path.

Crucially, not all paths are equal. Some are smooth and additive. Others are turbulent and overlapping. This distinction matters.

Composition vs. convolution

Many poems proceed largely by composition: meanings accumulate incrementally, with limited interference. But some poems—most strikingly Coleridge’s Kubla Khan—operate by convolution, overlapping distinct conceptual domains (visual–spatial, auditory–temporal, symbolic–ritual) so that they interact rather than simply add.

Convolution is powerful, but dangerous. Overlapping domains can interfere with one another, threatening experiential breakdown. This raises a fundamental question: how does such a poem remain continuous at all?

Sound as a carrier wave

The answer is not primarily semantic. It is dynamical.

In signal-processing terms, the poem’s sound structure—meter, rhyme, phonological recurrence—functions as a carrier wave. It provides a stable, low-information temporal scaffold on which high-information semantic modulation can ride.

Sound does not carry meaning here; it carries phase alignment. It keeps neural activity synchronized as the poem shifts domains. Rhyme, in this view, is not ornament but infrastructure: a phase-reset mechanism that prevents destructive interference during domain transitions.

This perspective aligns closely with empirical work on oral tradition and memory, where sound structure is known to support sequencing and recall while meaning is reconstructed opportunistically.

Segmentation and entry points

The same logic applies to segmentation. If a linguistic string is a projection of a high-dimensional path, then some substrings are better entry points into that space than others.

Fragments that respect syntactic or prosodic boundaries align with internal structure and support rapid pattern completion. Fragments that straddle boundaries are misaligned: they activate incompatible frames and fail to converge.

This is not just a theoretical claim. In informal experiments with large language models, * prompts that respected syntactic boundaries reliably triggered recognition of well-known texts (e.g., Hamlet’s soliloquy or the Gettysburg Address), while boundary-straddling prompts did not. Recognition failed not because of missing information, but because of misalignment.

Poetry as biophysical engineering

Seen this way, poetic form is a kind of engineering. It constrains linguistic material so that complex meaning can remain experientially coherent under biophysical limits. Sound structure enforces phase alignment during traversal; hierarchical segmentation ensures viable re-entry points into semantic space.

This also clarifies differences among poems. In This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, sound supports smooth movement within a single conceptual domain. In Kubla Khan, sound is load-bearing: without it, the poem’s domain-convolving machine would fall apart.

A working hypothesis

All of this can be summarized in a single hypothesis:

Poetic form constrains and exploits the dynamical properties of neural systems to maintain coherent experience under conditions of high semantic and conceptual load.

That, in essence, is what I mean by a biophysics of poetry. It does not replace interpretation—but it explains how interpretation remains possible in the first place. 

*William Benzon, Discursive Competence in ChatGPT, Part 2: Memory for Texts, Working Paper, September 27, 2023, 44 pp., https://www.academia.edu/107318793/Discursive_Competence_in_ChatGPT_Part_2_Memory_for_Texts 

Time for another run at “Kubla Khan”

I became “hooked” on “Kubla Khan” early in my career, somewhere around 1970 or so. I decided it was my intellectual touchstone: “a standard or criterion by which something is judged or recognized.” I would judge my intellectual progress by what I could say about that poem. (That’s why I entitled my first autobiographical essay “Touchstones.”) I wrote a master’s thesis about it in 1972, published my first article about it in 1985, and a later article in 2003. Between 2003 and now I’ve published some exploratory work. I’m thinking it may be time to take another run at the poem and see what I can do.

Preparatory to that effort I’ve moved all of my Coleridge material into a single section at Academia.edu: Coleridge. I’ve listed and linked those articles below:

Metaphoric and Metonymic Invariance: Two Examples from Coleridge, MLN Vol. 96, 1097-1105, 1981.

“Kubla Khan and “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” are two very different poems by the same poet. But they share the same two-part structure, and they share imagery as well. The roaring dell of “Lime-Tree” corresponds to the savage chasm of “Kubla Khan.” The concern with sight and sound manifest in “Kubla Khan” shows up in “Lime-Tree Bower” in the image of the creeking rook flying across the sun. And the way in which both Charles and the poet have access to that sight gives it a role similar to the sunny dome and caves of ice in “Kubla Khan,” where both the poet and his audience are linked through the image. These two poems share the same world. But they take radically different paths through it. One path is regulated by metonymy and unfolds though two consciousness moving through different parts of the same landscape. The other path is regulated by metaphor and so unfolds in two different worlds linked by a common image; the path it takes through these worlds is, however, the same.

Articulate Vision: A Structuralist Reading of ”Kubla Khan”, Language and Style, Vol. 8, 3-29, 1985.

Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" has a highly coherent structure in which the two parts of the poem exhibit the same ternary structure. Each can be divided into three sections, the middle of those three in turn has three subsections and again, the middle of the middle has three subsections. The first section ends with "A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice," a line which is then repeated in the middle of the second section. This structure encompasses both semantics and sound, uniting both in a single coherent mental act.

This is considerably reworked from my unpublished Johns Hopkins Master’s Thesis, “THE ARTICULATED VISION: Coleridge's ‘Kubla Khan’” (1972).

“Kubla Khan” and the Embodied Mind, PsyArt: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, Article 030915, 2003, https://www.psyartjournal.com/article/show/l_benzon-kubla_khan_and_the_embodied_mind

Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" has a very coherent structure. Two movements of the poem are each divided into three sections; in both cases the middle of those three in turn has three subsections and again, the middle of the middle has three subsections. The first movement ends with "A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice," a line which is then repeated at the structural midpoint of the second movement. This structure encompasses both semantics and sound, uniting both in a single coherent mental act. The semantics of the poem’s first movement involves a series of cognitive blends in which the neural self provides one input while Xanadu imagery provides the other. The semantics of the second movement involves manipulating the reality status of successive mental spaces. Underlying the entire poem is a “walk” by core brain mechanisms tracing territorial, sexual, and attachment patterns through the poem’s semantics. Coleridge’s 1816 preface embodies an abstract pattern that paradoxically asserts and denies the poem’s validity. On the internal evidence, the poem is whole and complete.

Talking with Nature in “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”, PsyArt: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, Article 043011, 2004, http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/journal/2004_benzon03.shtml

By recasting Vygotsky's account of language acquisition in neural terms we see that language itself functions as a transitional object in Winnicott's sense. This allows us to extend the Schwartz-Holland account of literature as existing in Winnicottian potential space and provides a context in which to analyze Coleridge's "This Lime-Three Bower." The attachment relationship (between Caretaker and Child) provides the poem's foundation. The poet plays the Child role with respect to Nature and the Caretaker role with respect to his friends. The friends, Charles in particular, play the mediating the role of transitional object in the first movement while Nature becomes a mediator between one person and another in the second movement. The first movement starts with the poet being differentiated and estranged from Nature and concludes in an almost delusional fusion of poet, friends, and Nature. The second movement starts with the poet secure in Nature's presence and moves to an adult differentiation between poet, friends, and Nature.

STC, Poetic Form, and a Glimpse of the Mind, Working Paper, 2013.

"Kubla Khan" and "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" are two very different poems by the same poet, Samuel T. Coleridge. Think of them as orthogonal to one another within the overall space of the human mind. This working paper provides descriptive accounts of both poems, compares them, and recounts some of the work in the newer psychologies – cognitive, evolutionary, and neuro- – that has recently been brought to bear on the study of literature and how that work is germane to these poems. It concludes with a brief chronology of the parallel trajectories of cognitive science and literary theory in the last half of the previous century.

The Problem of Form in “Kubla Khan”, Working Paper, 2017.

"Kubla Khan" has two movements. The movements have the same form: each movements segment into three components (where the middle component, in turn, segments into three components and, once again (the middle component segments into three components)). All other divisions are binary. Iif we concentrate on the centers of the two movements we have that seething fountain occupying the same SLOT (middle of the (middle of the (middle))) in the first movement as the dome and the cave occupy in the second movement. And the dome and caves occupy the same SLOT in the first movement as “drunk the milk of Paradise!” plays in the second movement. Notice that the final words of both movements, “ice” and “Paradise” respectively, rhyme.

Calculating meaning in " Kubla Khan " – a rough cut (Version 2), 2017

"Kubla Khan" and "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" are constructed on utterly different schemes, though they share some of the same underlying components. "Kubla Khan" is ontological and impersonal in character and makes extensive use of convolution in calculating meanings. It reveals the structure of being. "Lime-Tree Bower" is narrative and personal and makes little or no use of convolution. It reveals the unfolding of subjectivity in time. The two poems also differ in their versification, a differences which is related to their different strategies of meaning.

Note that GPT-3 was released on June 20, 2020. I responded with a working paper, GPT-3: Waterloo or Rubicon? Here be Dragons, on August 5. The current version is #4 and is dated May 7, 2022. On May 11 I issued the next working paper, which reflects how thinking about LLMs has changed my thinking about how the meaning of poems is computed.

Symbols and Nets: Calculating Meaning in "Kubla Khan", Working Paper, 2022.

This is a dialog between a Naturalist Literary Critic and a Sympathetic Techno-Wizard about the interaction of symbols and neural nets in understanding "Kubla Khan," which has an extraordinary structure. Each of two parts is like a matryoshka doll nested three deep, with the last line of the first part being repeated in the middle of the second. They start talking about traditional symbol processing, with addressable memory, and nested loops, and end up talking about a pair of interlinked neural nets where one (language forms) is used to index the other (meaning).

Note, I’ve just had a couple of sessions discussing three of those papers with ChatGPT. I’m pretty sure that, if and when I get around to it, I’ll have something new to say. But first I’ve got to finish my book (Play: How to Stay Human in the AI Revolution).

Poetry in humans and machines: Who’s great?

Hollis Robbins, LLM poetry and the "greatness" question, Anecdotal Value, Jan, 7, 2026.

I posted the following comment to Hollis’s article:

An oblique observation. To the extent that an LLM can be said to "simulate" a human brain, it would be simulating the neocortex. With only 16 B neurons the neocortex contains only 19% of 86 B neurons in the brain. Thus LLMs, no matter how many parameters, are operating with only a fraction of the capacity of a poet's brain. To be sure, the poems they're trained on were created by full-brained poets, so those poems bear the traces of full brains. But I figure a full-brained poet would be able to find new kinds of paths through the brain's full state space. An LLM's ability to do that would seem to be rather truncated.

It's not clear to me how this bears on greatness in poetry. But I would like to think that at least some poems are great because they opened up new whole brain possibilities.

The purpose of this post is to develop those ideas more carefully. First I’ll talk about the idea of the brain’s state space. Then we move to the idea of a text as tracing a path through that space. Finally we’ll take up greatness in poetry.

The phase space of a brain

The notion of phase space, as I’m using the term, derives from statistical mechanics. It’s a way of thinking about how a physical system changes over time. Change is a movement from one state of the system to another.

The phase space of a system depends on three things: 1) how many elements the system has, 2) how many states each element can take, and 3) how the individual elements are coupled. The phase space has a dimension for each element of the system. The system’s state at any given moment will be a point in the phase space.

If the system has only three elements, then its phase space has three dimensions. Its state at any moment will be a point in that space. Notice that time isn’t one of those dimensions. But as the system changes over time its position in the phase space will change as well. It is possible, however, keep track of those positions.

A phase space having only three dimensions is easy to visualize. What about a phase space with four, five, six, thirty-eight, of 999,000 dimensions? Impossible to visualize.

The human brain has roughly 86 billion neurons. A phase space with that many dimensions will have 86 billion dimensions; impossible to visualize. But the individual neuron might not be the appropriate element to be the primitive unit in the brain’s phase space. The individual synapse – a connection between one neuron and another – may be the appropriate phase space primitive. Each neuron is connected to an average of 7000 other neurons, making the number of dimensions in the brain’s phase space much higher. The exact number doesn’t matter; the point is simply that the phase space is huge.

Note that neurons do not operate independently of one another. They are coupled together. The brain is divided into a number of functional areas (NFA, my term) where the connections between neurons within an area are more numerous that the connections each neuron has to neurons in other NFAs.

At this point let me introduce a query I put to ChatGPT 5.2:

The human brain has roughly 86 billion neurons. How many different functional regions does it have? I believe that the neocortex has between 100 and 200 different functional regions, but only has 16 billion neurons or so. How many different functional regions do we have in subcortical area?

The resulting discussion was a bit messy and complicated, as these things can be, but the upshot is that that brain seems to have roughly 700 NFAs. Only half of them are in the cortex. That’s very important (recall my original comment to Hollis). Later in the conversation ChatGPT observed:

• If LLM behavior resembles anything in the brain, it most closely resembles cortical linguistic competence: high-dimensional, distributed patterning; associative completion; flexible recombination of learned material.
• But cortex is only one part of the full system. Even taking the cortex generously as “the cognitive engine,” it is not the whole engine.

Thus, “At best it’s like a subsystem of the brain, and specifically one that is downstream of bodily regulation, affect, action selection, and reinforcement gating.”

Text as trace

I tend to think of texts, any texts, as the trace of a trajectory through the brain’s state space. But, at best, an LLM models only part of that space. Thus, returning to ChatGPT:

Even when an LLM produces a convincing poem, its method is necessarily missing the full set of whole-brain constraints that shaped the poetic corpus it learned from. Therefore its exploration of possibility space is structurally truncated relative to the exploration performed by a whole-brain poet.

ChatGPT offered me this paragraph:

If we treat a text as a path through a brain’s phase space, then poetry is not simply the output of a language module. It is the trace of a whole-brain trajectory: language regions interacting with memory, interoception, affect, reward, attention, and social cognition. A large language model is trained on the textual residue of those trajectories — the fossil record, not the living process. The poems in its corpus were written by full-brained poets, so the text contains evidence of that fuller generative machinery. But the model’s own generative dynamics are constrained to what can be recovered from token sequences and their statistical regularities. However impressive the simulation, it is necessarily missing the deeper gating systems that, in humans, determine what becomes sayable, what becomes bearable, and what becomes necessary. My hunch is that some poems are great not merely because they are well-formed linguistic artifacts, but because they open new whole-brain possibilities — new stable pathways of feeling-and-thought — that alter what the mind can do afterward.

What of humans and AI’s

I then prompted ChatGPT:

The issue that’s hanging over this kind of discussion is ultimately: Are there good roles for humans in a world of intelligent machines or are we replaceable (and so will be replaced)? That’s a messy question that begs many issues as formulated and so is rather meaningless. [...]

At the moment I’m working on a book about the social and cultural implication of AI. I started working on the book last summer. I broke off work from September through about a week ago. I’m now back at it. Last year I had a title, scads of notes and drafts and two or three versions of an outline. I’ve now arrived at an outline that I don’t think I could have produced without the help of Claude and ChatGPT. Many of the chapters I was working on last year are in this new version, 6 of them in fact. But I’ve got two chapters I didn’t have last year and an overall architecture that I didn’t have. Moreover I don’t think I could have produced that architecture on my own. The AIs gave me the means of holding the whole thing in my head and working at different scales so that I’ve been able to do something new.

I’m a good thinker. I’m better working with AIs. I should think the same would be true for poets.

We had some further discussion and ChatGPT offered me this paragraph:

The question “Will AI replace us?” is too blunt to be useful. My own experience suggests something more precise: large language models can function as cognitive instruments that let a person think at scales they could not reliably manage alone. I can now hold a book-length architecture in view, revise it coherently, and move between local detail and global structure without losing the plot. I am not a poet, but I am a thinker, and I know the difference between producing text and producing understanding. The models are not merely faster typists with larger memories. They are interfaces that make new kinds of conceptual control possible. If that is true for expository thinking, it is likely true for poetry as well: not that the machine becomes the poet, but that the poet gains a new way to explore and stabilize trajectories through a much larger space of possibilities.

I’m willing to let things rest there for the moment.

(Oh, I also asked ChatGPT to produce that illustration at the head of this post.)

Poets wanted, $150 an hour

poets, $150/hr pic.twitter.com/jIc8cANXYQ

— tao te chic (@taotechic) August 30, 2025

Here's a link to the original advertisement.

Claude on the Eightfold Way: Sonnet 129, Fantasia, Kubla Khan

New working paper. Title above, link, abstract, table of contents, and introductory material below.

Download from Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/129826893/Claude_on_the_Eightfold_Way

ABSTRACT: A) The circular structure of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 the analysis mirrors contemplative technologies found in both Hindu/Buddhist and Christian traditions. The sonnet's recursive exploration of desire creates what can be understood as a secular meditation technology that operates through psychological rather than explicitly spiritual means, transforming destructive cycles into opportunities for deeper understanding.

B) Walt Disney's Fantasia (1940), functions as a cinematic mandala structured around the mystery of sound-sight relationships. Despite appearing as popular entertainment, Fantasia employs sophisticated contemplative architectures, including radial organization around central insights, recursive motifs (particularly hands as symbols of creative consciousness), and a progression that builds contemplative capacity rather than advancing linear narrative.

C) Coleridge's “Kubla Khan” provides the most striking example of unconscious contemplative mastery. Structural analysis reveals the poem's recursive architecture, where the emblem “A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice” functions as what modern AI research would recognize as a semantic attractor—a compressed representation in high-dimensional meaning space that contains the informational content of the entire preceding text. This insight, impossible before the advent of large language models, illuminates how consciousness naturally creates contemplative technologies through semantic compression and decompression cycles.

D) There is a consistent meta-pattern across all examined works: (1) presentation of a psychological or existential problem, (2) circular exploration that deepens rather than resolves the problem, (3) semantic compression into forms that contain the entire exploration, and (4) recursive return that transforms the initial problem into contemplative opportunity. Is this a fundamental cognitive architecture that emerges when consciousness operates at optimal integration?

E) Finally, the conversation itself becomes an example of the contemplative consciousness it analyzes, suggesting that such deep structural patterns represent universal features of human cognitive architecture rather than culturally specific techniques.

Contents

Prefatory Note: Full Circle 4
An Esoteric Reading of Sonnet 129 6
A Christian Reading: Felix Culpa 8
Compare the two readings 11
Summarize the Discussion 14
Memory Palace vs. Mandala 16
Walt Disney’s Fantasia 19
Confirmation 25
Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” 28
The Common Architecture 36
Recursion on Recursion 39
Summary 41
The Title-Page Mandala 43

Prefatory Note: Full Circle

The conversation I report in this paper simply evolved. I wanted to have a “pure” discussion of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129, “The Expense of Spirit,” in both Esoteric (Hindu/Buddhist) and Christian terms. I put “pure” in quotes because I had already done such a comparison in ChatGPT, but that was in the context of a longer discussion that began with having ChatGPT make a mandala suitable for the sonnet. That led me to suggest that ChatGPT examine particular aspects of the poem, the concluding couplet and the simile of the hunter. That is when I brought up that similar that I suggested a Tantric reading.

“What would happen,” I wondered, “if I simply asked for an esoteric reading of the poem, without any of the preparation I had in the existing discussion?” Since I had enabled a feature in ChatGPT that allows it to track back through earlier sessions, it seemed to me that, even if I started a new session with ChatGPT where I simply uploaded the text of 129 and asked for the readings, it might access the earlier work. I decided that I should switch to Claude for this exercise.

So here we are.

First I had Claude do an esoteric reading of Sonnet 129. I took a break and then added the Christian reading a few hours later. That was on June 4, 2025. I then came back the next day, June 5, and did the rest of the discussion – comparing the two readings, summarizing the discussion, and finally commenting on mandalas and memory palaces as cognitive tools – though not in one continuous session. Why did I then decided to switch from Shakespeare to Disney? Why not? Though seriously, it was the circular aspect, the mandala form.

Not only does Shakespeare call our attention to, report about, the cycle of desire/satisfaction/shame, but he takes us through the cycle two or three times in the course of the sonnet, depending on how you count them. The sonnet thus embodies the cycle in its very form. Similarly Fantasia cycles back and forth between little lessons about music, delivered by Deems Taylor, and the music itself, which has been visually realized through animation. That had been a signal point in my analysis of the film, but I was not thinking in terms of mandalas when I did that work over a decade ago. Now I am. The connection now seemed natural to me.

And so was the addition of “Kubla Khan” to the exercise. That poem, after all, with its center-symmetric structures, is what got me started on this adventure. “Kubla Khan” has been my touchstone, my lode star, my intellectual home base. I judge my intellectual progress according to whether or not I have gained new insight into that poem. Would it be too much to say that my intellectual life has been cycling to and from “Kubla Khan” for over fifty years?

A Note about the Title

Yes, the title is an allusion to Buddhist doctrine (mentioned on p. 43 below). But it also alludes to a book I saw in the home of one of my undergraduate professors, Dr. Richard Macksey. The book was entitled The Eightfold Way. I can’t recall whether or not I registered anything about the book other than the title, which intrigued me for some reason. Did I know that it was a collection of papers about quantum mechanics? I can’t recall.

The collection had been assembled by Murray Gell-Mann and Yuval Ne'eman and published in 1964. Gell-Mann had used that title for a paper he’d published in 1961, “The Eightfold Way: A theory of strong interaction symmetry.” Just why Gell-Mann chose to allude to Buddhist doctrine eludes me. Yes, it’s a mathematical scheme for ordering eight kinds of subatomic particles (hadrons) , but why liken that to Buddhism? Poetic license?

A New Dance Turn: “The Cat and the Moon”

I have decided to reissue my paper, A New Dance Turn: “The Cat and the Moon” All up in One Another, so that I can give it a new title page, one with the following mandala on it:

The paper itself is unchanged. Here's the abstract:

Abstract: The semantic structure of Yeats' "The Cat and the Moon" is embodied through a syntactic and sound structure which also goes through phases, phases which complement that semantic structure. The first phase consists of two four-line sentences, each weakly rhymed ABCB. The second phase continues with four-line rhyme groups, but the rhymes are strong. Syntactically, there is a strong alignment between rhyme groups and syntactic grouping in the first phase while there is no obvious alignment between sound and syntax in the second phase of the poem, which also contains two rhetorical questions. The poem's third phase synthesizes the stylistic features of the first two phases. It has the synchrony of rhyme and syntax that characterizes the first phase; but the rhymes are strong and the penultimate sentence of the poem is a rhetorical question—features of the second phase. The poem thus embodies, in both sound and sense, the cyclic interpenetration of opposites which is its meaning.

You may also download it at SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2481876
And at ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324667583_A_New_Dance_Turn_'The_Cat_and_the_Moon'_All_Up_in_One_Another#fullTextFileContent

Here's the full text: 

Yeats published the poem as a single long stanza. I’ve added empty lines to highlight the major structural divisions within the poem.

The Cat and The Moon

W. B. Yeats

1)   The cat went here and there 
2)   And the moon spun round like a top,
3)   And the nearest kin of the moon,
4)   The creeping cat, looked up.
5)   Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon,
6)   For, wander and wail as he would,
7)   The pure cold light in the sky
8)   Troubled his animal blood.

9)   Minnaloushe runs in the grass
10)  Lifting his delicate feet.
11)  Do you dance, Minnaloushe, do you dance?
12)  When two close kindred meet,
13)  What better than call a dance?
14)  Maybe the moon may learn,
15)  Tired of that courtly fashion,
16)  A new dance turn.

17)  Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
18)  From moonlit place to place,
19)  The sacred moon overhead
20)  Has taken a new phase.
21)  Does Minnaloushe know that his pupils
22)  Will pass from change to change,
23)  And that from round to crescent,
24)  From crescent to round they range?
25)  Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
26)  Alone, important and wise,
27)  And lifts to the changing moon
28)  His changing eyes.

GPT in the Classroom, Part 1: Five Sonnets on the Gettysburg Address

I realize that, with ready access to sophisticated chatbots, some students will use them to complete writing assignments rather than do the writing themselves. Since I no longer teach, however important that issue is, it is not a problem for me. I set it aside. That is not what this essay is about. I’ve got other fish to fry.

What opportunities does the existence of competent AI-generated literary texts present for teaching about the nature of texts? An obvious opportunity is to consider the difference between human-created and AI-generated texts. But that doesn’t interest me, not here and now. It’s too difficult. I am willing to take these texts at face value, giving them no favor or disfavor.

* * * * *

This is the first in a series of three posts in which I take up other issues. In this post I present five AI-generated sonnets based on the text of “Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address” and deal with the question of authorship. In the second essay I am going to present a poem based on a humorous story that Pope Francis told in a recent New York Times op-ed. In the third and final essay I once again take up the issue of authorship, using a sonnet based on three paragraphs from Miriam Yevick’s A Testament for Ariela.

The Five Sonnets

A GPT is a user-created device that can be installed in ChatGPT so that it can generate specialized output. These sonnets are generated by a GPT known as FredTheHeretic, aka FTH. It contains a small collection of poems by Frederic Turner that is uses as models and templates.

Here is the prompt I gave FTH:

Give me a sonnet based on the following text:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Here are the five sonnets it generated:

The Battle-Field: A Sonnet

Upon this ground where blood and tears have lain,
A nation forged in liberty still stands.
These fields once drank the courage of brave hands,
Yet whisper now of loss, enduring pain.

No words of ours could sanctify this space;
The deeds of those who fell surpass our breath.
Their valor, richer than the soil of death,
Ensures that time cannot their work erase.

We bear the burden, those who linger here,
To finish what their sacrifice began,
To weave a union, broad and strong and clear,
Upholding freedom's light for every man.

Let not their purpose fade, nor courage wane;
That dream they died for shall not die in vain.

The Unfinished Work

Here lies the proof of freedom’s fragile dream,
A nation’s heart laid bare in sacrifice.
The dead, whose silent deeds beyond suffice,
Have sown with blood what words can only seem.

No stone can hallow what their courage sealed,
No tongue can add to what they’ve dared and done.
The work remains; their labor is begun,
And calls us now upon this battle-field.

Shall we, the living, falter in this task,
Or turn away from what their lives bestowed?
Or shall we bear the torch, their honor’s load,
And in their shadow, shed our timid mask?

A government, by us, for us, must rise,
Lest freedom fall and perish where it lies.

Mary Jo Salter on poetry – Pay attention! [“make it new”]

Aleyna Rentz interviews Mary Jo Salter in the Johns Hopkins Magazine. Salter is emirata from the JHU Writing Seminars and is editor of The Best American Poetry 2024. Here's how the interview ends:

There's a trend that I've noticed, both in this collection and in contemporary poetry in general, where people write a lot more about the mundane than they used to. You never had Keats, for example, writing about doing household chores, but in this anthology there's a poem by Brandel France de Bravo called "After the Ecstasy, the Laundry." What do you think about this shift?

What poetry does, among other things, is force us to slow down and recognize that we haven't been paying attention. If we're going to the laundromat every Tuesday, we're likely in a rote mindset where we don't observe certain things. Depending on the poet, you're either saying after the ecstasy, the laundry, or after the laundry, the ecstasy. But in any case, life frees itself from the banal when we stop thinking or feeling in automatic ways. When we're surprised by feeling, that tends to produce a better poem than if we're not.

Fred the Heretic goes to New Orleans and appropriates some culture [Shine on Titanic]

Here’s some more poetry by FTH (aka Fred the Heretic), a GPT based on the poetry of Frederick Turner. But first, I give your a recitation of “Titanic,” though not of version I use in the prompt for FTH. 

“Titanic” is a toast, an oral narrative in the African-American tradition that is a precursor to rap and hip-hop. Toasts were discovered by scholars in the late 1960s, but they are undoubtedly much older. The "Titanic" toast is about, well, the sinking of the Titanic. As I say in the final chapter of Beethoven’s Anvil (p. 269):

After the Titanic sank in 1912, blacks began reciting a narrative poem in which a mythic black boiler man, Shine, escapes from the sinking ship and swims safely ashore. The ship’s captain attempts to keep Shine on board, first offering him money and then offering the sexual favors of white women, including his own daughter. Shine rejects all offers and remains steadfast in his determination to swim ashore. The poem thus rejects white evaluation of black character by depicting a white authority figure as being so depraved as to offer his daughter up to a boiler man for no rational purpose. This obsession, it implies, is a white folks’ problem and it’s about time they dealt with it.

More obviously, “Titanic” is also about white arrogance, the arrogance that believed the Titanic to be unsinkable, the arrogance that believed an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico couldn’t fail or, if it did, failure wouldn’t cause nasty problems.

I decided to use “Titanic” as a prompt for FTH (Fred the Heretic). Since it is a bit long, I decided to place it in an appendix after the two poems FTH derived from it.

FTH does “Titanic”

[The “Titanic” toast goes in here, along with the admonition: Take this and make a new poem:...]

The tale you shared echoes the rich oral tradition of vernacular storytelling and modern myth-making, particularly in its rhythm, vivid characters, and defiance of conventional authority figures. It's a gripping and colorful narrative.

Would you like me to refine or reimagine this story into a structured poem, or perhaps guide you in writing something akin to the storytelling style it exhibits? If so, I could craft it in the style of Frederick Turner, combining visual imagery, thematic depth, and rhythmic cadence. Let me know how you'd like to proceed!

Just make it as jivometric as sin.

Shine's Last Swim, Jivometric as Sin

The iceberg split the moon’s sharp grin,
a daggered slice through silvered seas.
Shine leaned on the boiler’s hiss, a hymn,
while the captain flexed his gilded keys.

“Shine!” cried the man, in his grand brass coat,
“You think this ship will founder? Please!
This is the Empire’s steel-bound throat,
not a skiff blown loose on the Gulf’s breeze.”

But Shine, he grinned, and his teeth were gold,
“Cap’n, I done seen the Devil’s face—
he’s frozen white, and his belly’s cold.
You stay? I’m gone. Ain’t no disgrace.”

The waters sang as Shine leapt free,
a cannonball into death’s embrace.
The stars smeared bright in their ecstasy,
the ship moaned low with her final case.

Through blackened brine and shark-eyed dark,
Shine churned the sea like a preacher’s tongue.
His strokes a psalm, his breath a spark,
his lungs were the bells the ocean rung.

Below, a banker, pale and fat,
splashed frantic, clutching his sopping green.
“Save me, Shine! I’ll make you rich as that
great northern king, or a Cajun queen!”

Shine laughed, “Your gold won’t buy no breath;
your notes ain’t worth a shrimp in this tide.
Swim, fool, swim! The deal is death,
and it don’t care for your dollar-eyed pride.”

The sharks came close, their fins were knives,
their teeth the hymn of an old lament.
“Shine,” one said, with a voice like lives
split wide in the jaws of the firmament.

“I rule these waves, from crest to trench,
my kingdom cold, my crown a fin.
You are but meat, your life a stench.
What man outruns the tides within?”

But Shine, he smiled, his muscles sleek,
a coiled machine of will and bone.
“You’re king?” he asked. “I’m the freak
that broke the throne and made it my own.

Your kind has teeth, but I got fire—
I taught the ocean to bend and bow.
Tell your tales to those who tire,
but I’m the man who won’t allow.”

And so he swam, the sea in his chest,
a city of light at the end of the foam.
New Orleans rose like a lover undressed,
and Shine, he grinned. The ocean was home.

Let them sink with their greed and pride,
their icebergs and captains who bowed to none.
Shine reached the shore with the morning tide,
his story still burning, a rising sun.

Fred the Heretic, GPT, does poetry, channeling Augustine, Burton, and Hollander

A little over a year ago OpenAI introduced GPTs:

We’re rolling out custom versions of ChatGPT that you can create for a specific purpose—called GPTs. GPTs are a new way for anyone to create a tailored version of ChatGPT to be more helpful in their daily life, at specific tasks, at work, or at home—and then share that creation with others. For example, GPTs can help you learn the rules to any board game, help teach your kids math, or design stickers⁠.

Anyone can easily build their own GPT—no coding is required. You can make them for yourself, just for your company’s internal use, or for everyone.

In the last few months Paul Fishwick got together with poet Fred Turner and created a GPT based on Fred’s poetry: FredTheHeretic (FTH). You give it a prompt and it gives you a poem based on that prompt. I’ve appended three such poems, along with the prompts I gave it. As always, my prompt is boldfaced.

* * * * *

Via Augustine: The Labyrinth of Memory

Create a poem based on the following passage from St. Augustine:

The power of memory is prodigious, my God. It is a vast immeasurable sanctuary. Who can plumb its depths? And yet it is a faculty of my soul. Although it is part of my nature, I cannot understand all that I am. This means, then, that the mind is too narrow to contain itself entirely. But where is that part of it which it does not itself contain? Is it somewhere outside itself and not within it? How, then, can it be part of it, if it is not contained in it?

Here is a poem inspired by St. Augustine's reflection on memory:

A vast cathedral echoes in the mind,
Its corridors both sunlit and obscure.
Here, vaults of thought and chambers intertwine,
Yet none can map its halls, none feel secure.

What architect has wrought this endless maze?
This holy depth that cannot self-contain?
Though crafted by the soul’s eternal blaze,
Its darkest wings defy its own domain.

Are we the gate, the keeper, or the door?
The mind’s eye scans itself, yet turns to doubt:
The part not held within must rest elsewhere,
But where, if not within? And where without?

Each thought a whisper from a distant shrine,
Each shrine a mystery of fire and stone.
We are too vast for limits to define,
Yet ever seeking limits to be known.

What holy paradox our being seems,
The housed and homeless mingled in our dreams. 

 

Via Burton: The Character of Mortality

Give me a poem based on this passage from Anatomy of Melancholy:

Melancholy, the subject of our present discourse, is either in disposition or habit. In disposition, is that transitory melancholy which goes and comes upon every small occasion of sorrow, need, sickness, trouble, fear, grief, passion, or perturbation of the mind, any manner of care, discontent, or thought, which causeth anguish, dullness, heaviness and vexation of spirit, any ways opposite to pleasure, mirth, joy, delight, causing frowardness in us, or a dislike. In which equivocal and improper sense, we call him melancholy that is dull, sad, sour, lumpish, ill disposed, solitary, any way moved, or displeased. And from these melancholy dispositions, no man living is free, no stoic, none so wise, none so happy, none so patient, so generous, so godly, so divine, that can vindicate himself; so well composed, but more or less, some time or other he feels the smart of it. Melancholy in this sense is the character of mortality.

Beneath the world’s bright, bustling veneer,
The shadow lingers, sharp and near—
A flicker in laughter, a crease in cheer,
That specter of sadness we all must bear.

At times, it comes like a thief at night,
Unbidden, quiet, beyond our sight.
The sigh of failure, the taste of grief,
The moments that mock our vain belief.

No fortress of wisdom, no well-set plan,
No stoic, nor saint, nor the luckiest man,
Can escape the touch of this human plight,
That binds us together in shadow and light.

For in the weight of the heart’s dark ache,
There is a rhythm no joy can fake.
We walk with it, stumble, and rise again,
The character of mortality, joy’s twin.

This constant ebb of the soul’s tides turning,
Melancholy’s glow, both searing and yearning.
To live is to linger in light and shade—
A journey where sorrow and mirth are made. 

 

Via Hollander: The Dance of Silent Meaning

Create a poem based on this one by John Hollander, which he created as a tribute to Noam Chomsky:

Curiously deep, the slumber of crimson thoughts:
While breathless, in stodgy viridian,
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

Here’s a poem inspired by John Hollander’s tribute to Noam Chomsky, blending thematic homage with my poetic sensibility:

Beneath a sable moon, strange echoes breathe—
A latticework of absence, bright with fire,
Unspoken words thread veils of trembling air,
Soundless, yet roaring through the mind’s deep choir.

A crimson thought unfurls, enraged yet calm,
Its sleep a paradox of soft alarms;
Through midnight roots, green whispers writhe and swell,
Their fury cradled in night's quiet arms.

This place of thought is no mere void of speech—
It churns with movements alien, unseen.
Here, colors burn in silent symphony:
Where furious green ideas sleep, serene.

The most beautiful-sounding poem in English: "Kubla Khan"

Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" and honestly it's not even close. https://t.co/VBMv8KcQSC

— Adam Roberts (@arrroberts) September 16, 2024

A deceased mathematician, Miriam Lipschutz Yevick, replies to a pontificating venture capitalist, Mark Andreesen, about the state of humanity.

I don’t believe Andreesen has actually graced us with his thoughts on humanity as a whole, but I’m taking his recent capacious The Techno-Optimist Manifesto as a proxy for those thoughts. As for Yevick, while she died in 2018, I can readily imagine that she would have had quite a bit to say in response to Andreesen. And for all I know, somewhere in her papers we might find something she had said about him, for it is highly likely that she knew who he was.

What I can say for sure, having by now read quite a bit of her work, is that she cared and thought deeply about humanity, both past and future. Back in 2013 she made a few entries in a blog. While the blog is no longer available on the open web, I was able to find it through the Wayback Machine. One entry, dated February 26, 2023, was a poem about humanity, from the beginnings up through the present and into the future. I’m reproducing that below. By way of analytic commentary, I ask you to compare the opening lines with the concluding lines.

* * * * *

Homo Sapiens

HOLD YOUR HEAD HIGH!
PROUD TO BE A SAPIENS HOMO SAPIENS.
(A Self-help poem)

First was the Word

“Darling! Darling!”
The mother exclaims, echoing the joy she felt
at her child’s moment of conception.
Now the newborn emerges, high its forehead
guardian of its birthright: intellect, consciousness and conscience,
unique among all species.

Unto us a Babe is born! One more
Sapiens Homo Sapiens of Homo Sapienses,
the only surviving species of our original ancestors.
Genetic blood brethren and sisters,
all of us.

Today is the birthday of the species.
“Hinei Ma Tov ou Manayim. Shevet Achim gam Yachad”
(How good it is to sit together with our brethren.)

Exultate! Jubilate! Rejoice! Rejoice!

Who are we then?

The simple, nameless herd of humanity
Hath deed and faith that art truth enough for me.
Euripides.

Ophra
John Armstrong.

John Lennon
Johan Sebastian Bach

The lady making change at the forty-second street subway station.
The woman with the spiked heels on Madison Avenue.

The Kahn Brothers
The Koch Brothers

Michaelangelo
Mark Ecko, the Graffiti artist at the forty-second street subway station.

Marie Antoinette
The Bag Woman begging at the forty second street subway station.

Albert Einstein
The Nameless stone age discoverer of the pressure-flaking technique.

Jesus Christ
Helen Keller

Mark Zuchkerberg
The woman sitting next to you on the subway train

Rupert Murdoch
Napoleon Bonaparte

Continue, go on, go complete the list.: your mother, your father, your great grand children, your great-grandfather… On and on, scoop them all up, up and down, right and left, one big genetic family. Is there completion either way?

“For on Calvary of Christ’s blood Christendom
                                               sprang.
Blood brethren became we there and gentlemen
                                              each one.”
Piers Plowman (Twelfth Century)

Not one of a nameless herd, but a proud Homo Sapiens, with a passion for distinction. You can pick them out, distinct one by one, among the millions clamoring for a life of dignity. You can see their faces in print.. ….You can find their names on Facebook to be your friends for life.

How long?

When timeless time was stagnant
with no human to observe it,
was the emerging little cell,
innocent of its destiny
guided by God, or Nature, or Evolution?
None cared.

Once, about one hundred thousand years ago, the silent void was rent and perhaps thirty thousand of the species Homo Sapiens stalked the earth. They stayed several tens of millennia, braved the changing climate, left us a few skeletons and disappeared. Time lost to us.

Give or take twenty millennia later, time’s stage was yielded once again to our immediate ancestors, the species Homo Sapiens – with another “Sapiens” tacked to its name – and dropped into the earth’s lap to step into the breach.

Hunting and fishing,
fashioning stone implements,
then bronze and iron ones,
tilling the soil, planting crops,
domesticating animals,
building altars and monuments
traveling and inventing,
learning and thinking …
as the millennia moved fast forward.

How many?

“Look at the heavens,” God said to Abraham, “and count its stars. Can you count them? That many will your offspring be.”

Not uncountable but one hundred ten billion members of our surviving human species have lived and peopled the earth until now. Seven billion of those are still alive to this very day. We can pair every ten of the latter with one of the two hundred million of our predecessors living in the year zero, two millennia ago, and cover the whole lot since. That is how close the ties are that bind our generations together.

Seven billion, 7 x 10^9 made of the same stuff as ourselves, the only ones who speak a human language, in the whole big universe with its 10^22 stars.
Can we afford to lose even a single one?

Do we care to disappear? To let the roaches rule the world?

What then have we wrought?

It is not God, or Nature or Evolution who have transformed the world. It is us ourselves.

The flag planted on the moon
The I pad
Stonehenge
The Pyramids
The Salk Vaccine
The Magna Charta
The Bill of Rights
The Scientific Method
Our Bible, Wikipedia
Our cathedral, the Verezano Bridge.

There is a bridge by the name Verezano
Floating on air, held up by
A harp of silver cables recasting
the radiating sun’s golden rays,
converging toward a slender arch,
a portal to lift our souls to heaven.

Last was the Word

We have culled the words of our language
From our common origins.
The groans and giggles of passion
morphed into the poetry of love,
and the primordial bond
hallowed in our last exclamation:
“Mamma!” Maman!” “Mutti!” “Ima!” “Mummy!” “ Mother!” “Mammele!”

Mother Earth, Mother dear, may our species live for
Ever and Ever!

 

Miriam Lipschutz-Yevick
Retired Associate Professor of Mathematics
Rutgers The State University
Copyright 2011

Coleridge's "Limbo" – Another ring composition?

This is from July 31, 2016. I'm bumping it to the top because we need a reminder of poetry.

While wandering in cyberspace, as I am sometimes wont to do, I came across a most curious, and thus alluring, blog: Samuel Taylor Bloggeridge. What a peculiar name, thought I, not realizing that this particular locus solus belonged to my old buddy from The Valve, Adam Roberts. Really though, thinking in retrospect, who else could it be? "Bloggeridge" indeed!

But then, Ted Nelson coined the term and birthed the concept of hypertext as an antidote to the (drug-induced) memory loss that (supposedly) gave us "Kubla Khan", did he not? He even called it Project Xanadu, long before Olivia Newton-John sang the song and did the movie (which has Gene Kelley's last film performance). One can only imagine how STC would tear-ass about cyberspace were he alive today.

In any event, and getting back on track, I'd come across a post Adam had written about "Limbo", one of STC's many poems that I have not studied. He wrote about it in a most tempting way. Thus:

The first thing to say about 'Limbo' is that its 28 lines divide into a central 12-lines section flanked by two paired 8-line sections, the first a kind of introduction, the second a sort of summary. What the two outer passages frame is a central image of 'human Time' as an old, blind man staring at the moon.

You can bet my ears pricked up when I read that. Like a hound on point I was. A bit later: “The circle in the centre of this circling poem has become a 'circumambience' prison-wall that imprisons ('immures', 'enthrals').” Be still my heart! "Circle", "circling"!? Could it be? Is this another ring-composition? What about the chiasmatic line 20 (which Adam fingers as consisting of monosyllables): "He seems to gaze at that which seems to gaze on him!" 

I've reset the poem to bring out the ring-form possibility. Give it a read and see what you think.

'Tis a strange place, this Limbo!—not a Place,
Yet name it so;—where Time and weary Space
Fettered from flight, with night-mare sense of fleeing,
Strive for their last crepuscular half-being;—
   Lank Space, and scytheless Time with branny hands
   Barren and soundless as the measuring sands,
   Not mark'd by flit of Shades,—unmeaning they
   As moonlight on the dial of the day!
      But that is lovely—looks like Human Time,—
      An Old Man with a steady look sublime,
      That stops his earthly task to watch the skies;
      But he is blind—a Statue hath such eyes;—
         Yet having moonward turn'd his face by chance,
         Gazes the orb with moon-like countenance,
         With scant white hairs, with foretop bald and high,
         He gazes still,—his eyeless face all eye;—
      As 'twere an organ full of silent sight,
      His whole face seemeth to rejoice in light!
      Lip touching lip, all moveless, bust and limb—
      He seems to gaze at that which seems to gaze on him!
   No such sweet sights doth Limbo den immure,
   Wall'd round, and made a spirit-jail secure,
   By the mere horror of blank Naught-at-all,
   Whose circumambience doth these ghosts enthral.
A lurid thought is growthless, dull Privation,
Yet that is but a Purgatory curse;
Hell knows a fear far worse,
A fear—a future state;—'tis positive Negation!

Alternatively:

'Tis a strange place, this Limbo!—not a Place,
Yet name it so;—where Time and weary Space
Fettered from flight, with night-mare sense of fleeing,
Strive for their last crepuscular half-being;—

Lank Space, and scytheless Time with branny hands
Barren and soundless as the measuring sands,
Not mark'd by flit of Shades,—unmeaning they
As moonlight on the dial of the day!

But that is lovely—looks like Human Time,—
An Old Man with a steady look sublime,
That stops his earthly task to watch the skies;
But he is blind—a Statue hath such eyes;—

Yet having moonward turn'd his face by chance,
Gazes the orb with moon-like countenance,
With scant white hairs, with foretop bald and high,
He gazes still,—his eyeless face all eye;—

As 'twere an organ full of silent sight,
His whole face seemeth to rejoice in light!
Lip touching lip, all moveless, bust and limb—
He seems to gaze at that which seems to gaze on him!

No such sweet sights doth Limbo den immure,
Wall'd round, and made a spirit-jail secure,
By the mere horror of blank Naught-at-all,
Whose circumambience doth these ghosts enthral.

A lurid thought is growthless, dull Privation,
Yet that is but a Purgatory curse;
Hell knows a fear far worse,
A fear—a future state;—'tis positive Negation!

The first setting implies a nested structure:

       ( 1 ( 2 (3 ( X ) 3 ) 2 ) 1 )

The second implies a travel structure:

       1 > 2 > 3 > X > 3 > 2 > 1

This, obviously, requires some explanation. But not now.

GPT-4 interprets Shakespeare’s great sonnet, “Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame” [Are LLMs capable of moral reasoning?]

This is a sonnet I know well because I published two papers on it early in my career: Cognitive Networks and Literary Semantics (1976) and Lust in Action: An Abstraction (1976). Both are the cognitive networks models I developed while working with David Hays at SUNY Buffalo. As such they are not interpretations or reading of the poem. Rather, they are attempts to depict some of the conceptual structure underlying the poem. Preliminary and provisional as that work was, it changed forever my approaching to thinking about literature and the mind.

Do those models capture anything about what went on as GPT-4 read the poem and then responded to my prompts about it? I do not know. It would be interesting to find out.

This interaction took place on April 6, 2023 at 7:32 AM using the Mar 23 version of GPT-4. GPT-4’s response to the poem is quite sophisticated. You might be wondering, “Why did you introduce the idea of the Fortunate Fall?” Simple, I included it in my 1976 model of the poem’s semantic structure. I have previously asked ChatGPT about the Fortunate Fall in connection with Milton’s Paradise Lost.

GPT-4 exhibits a sophisticated capacity for analogical and interpretive reasoning once I start quizzing it about the hunting simile in lines 7 and 8. I am particularly impressed with how it was able to integrate the idea of the Fortunate Fall into its reasoning. Having done so already in the 1976 paper, it knew it was possible, but still, it was impressive to see GPT-4 do it. I was particularly impressed with its remarks about spiritual growth in the penultimate paragraph.

I know that the folks who are worried about AI existential risk are hyperventilating about disagreeable, angry and threatening remarks made by various LLMs. If they are going to insist that such remarks are evidence of the dangerous nature of LLMs, then I am going to insist that they give credence to GPT-4’s moral reasoning in its remarks about Sonnet 129. Perhaps the behavioral proclivities of LLMs are a reflection of and response to the attitudes of their human interlocutors.

* * * * *

Here is a well-known Shakespeare sonnet. What can you tell me about it?

Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action, and till action, lust
Is perjured, murd’rous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had,
Past reason hated as a swallowed bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad:
Mad in pursuit and in possession so,
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe,
Before, a joy proposed, behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

The sonnet you have presented is Sonnet 129, one of William Shakespeare's 154 sonnets. This sonnet is classified as a "dark" or "problem" sonnet due to its subject matter, which explores the destructive nature of lust and sexual desire.

The sonnet begins with the line "Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame," which suggests that indulging in lustful desires is not only wasteful but also damaging to one's spiritual well-being. The poem goes on to describe the negative consequences of lust, including deceit, violence, and cruelty.

The lines "Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight, / Past reason hunted, and no sooner had, / Past reason hated as a swallowed bait / On purpose laid to make the taker mad" depict the fleeting and unsatisfying nature of lustful pleasures, which can leave the individual feeling empty and disappointed.

The final couplet, "All this the world well knows yet none knows well / To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell," implies that while people are aware of the destructive nature of lust, they continue to pursue it anyway. The speaker urges the reader to resist the temptation of lustful desires and avoid the "heaven" that ultimately leads to "hell."

Overall, Sonnet 129 is a powerful commentary on the dangers of unchecked desire and the importance of exercising self-control.

What do you make of that hunting simile in lines 7 and 8? Who laid the bait? Who is the hunter? What kind of hunting does Shakespeare seem to have in mind?

The hunting simile in lines 7 and 8 of Sonnet 129 compares the pursuit of lust to the act of hunting. The line "Past reason hunted" suggests that the pursuit of lust is irrational and driven by primal instincts, rather than reason.

The phrase "swallowed bait / On purpose laid to make the taker mad" implies that someone or something has intentionally laid the trap of lust to ensnare the individual and lead them down a destructive path. This could be interpreted as a critique of societal norms or expectations that encourage indulgence in lustful desires, or perhaps the speaker is suggesting that lust is a trap laid by one's own desires and impulses.

As for who the hunter is, it could be interpreted as either the individual pursuing the lustful desires or the external forces that encourage such behavior. Shakespeare seems to be suggesting that the pursuit of lust is a self-destructive act that can lead to madness and despair.

The hunting metaphor used in these lines could also be seen as a commentary on the nature of the pursuit itself. Hunting, particularly in Shakespeare's time, was often associated with aristocratic pursuits and displays of power. The metaphor could therefore be seen as a critique of the excessive and reckless behavior of the elite, who indulged in lustful desires without thought for the consequences.

“Hunting, particularly in Shakespeare's time, was often associated with aristocratic pursuits and displays of power. The metaphor could therefore be seen as a critique of the excessive and reckless behavior of the elite, who indulged in lustful desires without thought for the consequences.” Interesting. I like that.

Yes, Shakespeare often used his works to comment on the social and political issues of his time. The metaphor of hunting could be seen as a critique of the behavior of the aristocracy, who were often seen as indulging in excesses without thought for the consequences. By comparing the pursuit of lust to the act of hunting, Shakespeare may be suggesting that the pursuit of carnal desires is similarly excessive and reckless, and that it ultimately leads to negative consequences. The poem can therefore be seen as a warning against the dangers of unchecked desire, regardless of one's social status or position.

If we think of sexual satisfaction as the snare or bait laid to draw humans into this tangle of impossible desires, then who or what might have laid that snare?

The question of who or what might have laid the snare of sexual desire is a complex one, and different interpretations are possible.

One possibility is that the snare is simply the natural human desire for sexual pleasure, which can be so powerful that it leads individuals to engage in destructive behaviors. In this interpretation, the snare is not necessarily a deliberate trap laid by anyone or anything, but rather a natural aspect of human desire.

Another interpretation is that societal norms or expectations might have laid the snare. For example, the poem could be seen as a critique of the restrictive and oppressive sexual mores of Shakespeare's time, which may have led individuals to suppress or deny their natural desires. In this interpretation, the snare is laid by the societal expectations that individuals must conform to in order to be considered moral or virtuous.

Alternatively, the snare could be seen as the result of external pressures or influences, such as advertising, media, or cultural messages that promote sexualized images and ideals. In this interpretation, the snare is laid by the cultural forces that shape our desires and attitudes towards sex.

Ultimately, the interpretation of who or what might have laid the snare of sexual desire is up to the reader, and different readers may have different perspectives on this question.

Are you aware of the medieval idea of the Fortunate Fall (felix culpa)?

Yes, I am aware of the medieval Christian concept of the Fortunate Fall, also known as the felix culpa. The idea comes from St. Augustine and refers to the belief that Adam and Eve's disobedience in the Garden of Eden, which led to the fall of humanity, was actually a fortunate event because it allowed for the redemption of mankind through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

The idea is based on the belief that God's plan for humanity included the eventual redemption of mankind through the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. According to this view, the fall of Adam and Eve was a necessary part of God's plan, as it allowed for the eventual salvation of humanity through Jesus.

The concept of the Fortunate Fall became an important theme in medieval Christian theology and literature, and was often depicted in art and literature as a way of celebrating the grace of God in overcoming human sin and weakness.

If we interpret the final couplet of sonnet 129 in light of that doctrine, how would that work out?

If we interpret the final couplet of Sonnet 129 in light of the Christian concept of the Fortunate Fall, we might read the couplet as a warning against the dangers of giving in to sinful desires, but also as a recognition of the redemptive potential of such actions.

In this interpretation, the "heaven" that "leads men to this hell" might be seen as a reference to the temptation of sin, which can lead individuals into a state of moral and spiritual degradation. The "hell" itself might be seen as a metaphor for the negative consequences of such actions, which can include shame, guilt, and the loss of self-respect.

However, the final line, "To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell," could also be read as a recognition that sin can be a necessary part of the human experience, and that it can ultimately lead to redemption and salvation. This interpretation suggests that even though sin may lead individuals into a state of moral degradation, it can also provide an opportunity for spiritual growth and transformation.

Thus, the final couplet of Sonnet 129 can be seen as a complex meditation on the nature of sin and redemption, and a recognition of the paradoxical relationship between the two.