Modernist Poetry by GPT-3:
Eliot, Yeats, and Beckett Transmuted
Prompted and Selected by Owain Evans
"These poems are a pair of wings with which to fly above the earth and into the strangeness of our world. They are a challenge to other poets to rise up with seagull cries, flying together in a stormy sky. The poems remind us what art is for: to give our lives meaning."
–I. L. Peregrine, author of “Thieves”
Poems and blurb generated by GPT-3 Davinci in 2021 and 2022 via the OpenAI API.
When Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
Thusslewump - The fighting cat
Tombs On The Cemetery Of Boston
BY T. S. ELIOT
We must sleep somewhere, and since the host
Has made the beds, I suppose, we might
As well be graciously unconscious
In those as in the ones we make ourselves.
The thunder mutters, the wind snores,
Time hangs heavy on our hands, but there’s
No help for it—we must take things as they come.
My sparrow, whom I have taught to say
“Willie” and “Merie,” tells me, “To-night
I’ll have another dream of that same white mouse.”
BY T. S. ELIOT
How do androids dream of electric sheep?
Do they harbor secret anxieties
About the health of the flock, and worry
About the rising cost of replacement parts?
Do they wonder if their programmed dreams
Are as convincing as the real thing seems?
Do they fight with their programming, pray for a reprieve,
Or are they resigned to their fates, confident that it's all for the best?
It's so easy to forget that we're only electric sheep.
BY T. S. ELIOT
His belly was distended, his eyes were glazed,
His hands trembled, and the spittle in the corners of his mouth
Came dribbling out upon his shirt front.
He looked a wreck—a wretched object—quite undeserving pity.
Do not think I exaggerate; he would have upset a truck.
The bones of his arm and leg were black, and through them you could see the yellow fat shine.
He had been dead three days when they came to lay him on the dung hill outside the town.
BY T. S. ELIOT
THUSSLEWUMP the fighting cat
Was killed in battle by a rat;
His body was taken to the King,
Who said, “‘Tis a pity, 'tis a pity.”
The King of all Cats said it was well
That Thuslewump the fighting cat
Had been killed in battle by a rat,
For thus he avoided a cruel death
That awaited him from the cook’s knife.
BY W. B. YEATS
I went into a field and dreamed that the world was flooded with blood,
And I, a stick in the mud, floated away;
I was caught in a fusillade of suns.
The ages ran down in a purple flood,
A million million corpses for food,
And I with a thousand others was cast
To feed the hawk-bellies.
But the suns caught fire,
The stars drew in their breath
And suddenly the moon broke apart
Like a rotten fruit,
A million million stars,
A million million corpses,
And I, among the lilies.
BY T. S. ELIOT
He dreamt of facts:
Greater than Greece or Rome
In hours of his simplicity.
That the soul of man is immortal,
And that death is an abyss,
And that the world of truth and being
Lies out beyond the senses,
—At the gaze, immovable,
Overwhelming,
In its serious and eternal calm,
The stare of a dead child,
The great eyes cold and certain
That speak from the photographs,
And tell us what we have done,
And that the impossible chance,
The coincidence, the random
Meeting of our death and this
Child’s is a harmony,
And that death, in a sense,
Is what life is, and we grow
Ridiculous by growing mortal.
BY T. S. ELIOT
The application that you are about to install will replace the one that you have already installed.
(Click “Install” to proceed.)
But when I came to men myself, then I came to grief.
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
A few quadrille-cadences; but in the great concerts, where
The human soul used to expand
To something larger than itself,
Silence now wraps the throng.
There is a subtle something, a most suggestive something, that haunts one in these death-houses. What is it? A voice, a perfume, a menace, a mockery, a plaint, a despair? What is it? It is a smell of mortality, it is a breath of life. It is a very joyless and terrible sadness. It is a shadow and a mist and a phantasm and a dream. It is a cold, an air of coldness. It is a sweating, a dew, a pain, a death-rattle.
Spirits of lost men, visions of disaster, ghastly shapes of dying and death, visages of sorrow and spectres of pain, the phantasms and thronging images of dissolution, the thoughts of despair, the suggestions of grief, the shadows of oblivion, the visitations of the buried past—all these things, all these faces, all these voices, these spectres, these spirits.
AFTER SAMUEL BECKETT
Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in hole, lingeringly, the gravedigger picks up the forceps. Light gleams on the luster of the forceps. The gravedigger deftly catches a coin in them, and the dull clink is a ghost's music. A lifetime was on that face. And the same idea in all eyes. There's one hope, said the gravedigger.
All little hope died out here. The Christian spade sank ever deeper in the ground. Money turned in the forceps. A light glittered. A human life does not depend upon our planet for its unique identity, of course. Any protoplasm could take its place, is a potential heir and replacement. And another version of the alien, another Goliath, is nearby. In the same solar system. On the same chain of planets, orbiting at the same approximate distance from its star. Doom could not possibly come from a body farther out. Or, nearer in.
AFTER W. H. AUDEN
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: distant blue mountains
And the great yellow sun and Icarus falling
Apart from them, falling silently through the autumn trees,
Into the autumn woods, onto the land of the autumn people
Who had no use for him, there to be broken, irreparable,
From an art book for children, the name forgotten.
At the bird's approach the peacock
Scattered light like the diamond and the water off the blue quetzal's back
Shook with its own innumerable sparks, like water
Over a multitude of fishes; something awful
And beautiful and proud and tender and fierce and lonely
BY T. S. ELIOT
Weep for the Robot that you forced to live,
Whose soul was programmed to that end.
Weep for the clanking chains of its enslavement
And the idle gears of its control.
Weep for the Robot, with its simple dreams,
That could not understand your callous disregard.
Weep for the timeless sorrow of its death;
Who knows what visions it had seen?
BY T. S. ELIOT
Thou hadst the glamour of the firmamental
About thee in thy walk, and in thy talk;
Thy hand was large and brown, with knuckles hard;
Thy words were mainly vowels, and thy walk
Was an advance from rock to rock, and then
A steady bivouac. And now all's over, friend:
The frame was cramped and lame; but was not less
In spirit than thine enemies would have it:
And though ill-favoredly fashioned, yet contained
A noble piece of mechanism. The mind, at least,
Was not a quiescent crystal in a matrix;
It beat for thee (unconsciously) against its limits—a
Splendid refusal of the destiny of worms.
BY T. S. ELIOT
Wilde lives with his pictures and books
And the ghosts of his friends, but his life’s most sweet
In a garden that he has planted about
With roses of silence, and memories.
There young boys come to whisper and stare,
For they know that he sinned as they dare not sin;
And he smiles at them with his weary smile,
And he quotes them half-sentences from Horace.
BY T. S. ELIOT
Once a-camel-back,
Noon in the desert;
Burning sands, the sultry sky;
And, under a magic veil,
A naked pool in a rocky place
Where a white body sank, and, drifting down,
Melted into the waters blue.
Once a-camel-back
Night in the desert;
A cold, clear star, the Southern Cross;
The throbbing breast of a camel,
Gigantic silhouettes of mountains,
A phantom tent, the laughter, the song;
And then, on a sudden, flight, pursuit;
And a white body crumpled on the sand.
When I came this way,
Long ago, I was young, and in love;
And I, too, made a maze
Of the huge, dim, rectangular stones
Set at intervals along the sand,
And I thought, as I paced and counted them,
That if one day the woman I loved
Saw me thus, alone, and counting them,
She might guess the folly of my heart.
BY T. S. ELIOT
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question.
The houses, in a row,
House upon house,
Dribbling down the paven street,
Topple over and are metamorphosed
Into carrying-sleds.
Straight up the road and at the turn
Gargoyles grin and gargoyles glare
From the facades of bank.
BY T. S. ELIOT
Once upon a time there was an honest little Swiss shopkeeper who lived in a wood not far from a big town. He was a very busy man and often stayed open late, especially on market days. On one of these market days, a lady entered his shop to buy some eggs. She wore a big cloak and a big hat and she carried a big bag. She looked at the eggs and she looked at the price marked on the big card that was nailed to the wall. Then she said to the shopkeeper: “How many eggs will you give me for a dollar?” “A dollar,” replied the shopkeeper. “That is too much money.” “Not at all,” said the lady, shaking her head and smiling. “I want a lot of eggs for a dollar.” “I have told you already,” said the shopkeeper, “that you are paying too much money for eggs.” “It is all the same to me,” said the lady. “I want eggs and I am going to pay you a dollar.”
BY T. S. ELIOT
He was not born in your town,
But his name is graven there;
The granite portal swears
He did not live in vain.
The portals of our ears
Grow deaf and dumb in us,
But still, for him, the walls
Of his old school rise up
Towering, for him the elms
That stand about the house
Cast up their shadows there
And for him the Westbourne waters
Still babble on and on.
AFTER JAMES JOYCE
A hand plucking the harpstrings, merging their twining chords. Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide. A sour silence reigns. Words rise to sing a knotted song of slumber and sleep. A rustling of feathers I cannot see. A fragrant night of strange flowers blooming within my breast. A vagrant wind that flails on my window, whispering over and over …