{"id":354,"date":"2022-03-20T19:41:50","date_gmt":"2022-03-20T19:41:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jeffreymbinder.net\/?p=354"},"modified":"2024-04-13T15:41:43","modified_gmt":"2024-04-13T15:41:43","slug":"a-machine-generated-tintern-abbey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jeffreymbinder.net\/?p=354","title":{"rendered":"A Machine-Generated “Tintern Abbey”"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following is a poem generated by GPT-3<\/a>. The text in bold is the prompt that I entered; the rest was generated by a machine. I discuss this text in my article “The Datafication of Culture: Romanticism and AI-Generated Poetry<\/a>.”<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Tintern Abbey<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

By Tantalus Greenville<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Confused, distracted\u2014still the feverish thirst<\/p>\n

For Nature hath not left me; ’tis the gift,<\/p>\n

The vision and the faculty divine,<\/p>\n

Though dimmed, not destroyed; and still at times,<\/p>\n

In moments of electric tension,<\/p>\n

When all the floodgates of the soul dilate<\/p>\n

And open to the universal sea,<\/p>\n

I see, and sing, by my own spirit taught,<\/p>\n

The mighty visions of the world, the real.<\/p>\n

But from the years that have been undimmed,<\/p>\n

The years that have been happy, I must turn<\/p>\n

To my first childish days, with all their doubts,<\/p>\n

And with a mixture of all feelings blent.<\/p>\n

Strange, even from my first remembrance, is<\/p>\n

The recollection of the spot where first<\/p>\n

In all the world my infant feet were set.<\/p>\n

Strange, is the fact that of that spot I know<\/p>\n

No more than that it lies within a wood,<\/p>\n

And all I would recall of it is bound<\/p>\n

Within the limits of a single tree.<\/p>\n

Time, tide, and change, and things so dear and so<\/p>\n

Obsessed and haunting and yet still so weak,<\/p>\n

That I have not the words to speak of them,<\/p>\n

Wherein the present, the past, and future, seem<\/p>\n

To interchange their hues, as on the wing<\/p>\n

Of some light chrysolite the shadows blend,<\/p>\n

As on the plumage of a bird in heaven<\/p>\n

The sunlight and the rain-drops interchange,\u2014<\/p>\n

Seemed always at my side, and looked at me<\/p>\n

With eyes so wild and so unearthly bright<\/p>\n

That it o’ercame my infant reason’s might,<\/p>\n

And I would fall asleep to dream again.<\/p>\n

And while I slept, while slumber soothed my mind,<\/p>\n

And while my bed was in the forest green,<\/p>\n

My playmates were the young of things that lived<\/p>\n

In earth, in air, in water, all around.<\/p>\n

In vain to me the human shape was given,<\/p>\n

The human voice, the human form divine;<\/p>\n

I was an alien in the midst of men,<\/p>\n

I lived with some wild sisterhood of things<\/p>\n

That were not born of earth by human mothers,<\/p>\n

There was no human soul in all the world<\/p>\n

Brighter or more beautiful than they.<\/p>\n

Not all the thoughts of men the thoughts of men\u2014<\/p>\n

Me they bewildered, and me they beguiled,<\/p>\n

And they beguiled my judgment, till I deemed<\/p>\n

That all was only what the eye could see,<\/p>\n

That all was only what the heart could feel,<\/p>\n

And of such things as were above and below<\/p>\n

I knew not, and I cared not. All of earth,<\/p>\n

All of its haunts, all of its living things,<\/p>\n

With all their joys and sorrows, I forsook;<\/p>\n

For I was living upon some far height<\/p>\n

Of air or sea, or in some elysium,<\/p>\n

Upon some star, upon some flower, or tree,<\/p>\n

Or in the waters of some murmuring stream.<\/p>\n

But with the glory of the earth and air,<\/p>\n

And of the seas and mountains, I grew tired,<\/p>\n

And desperately I turned to look once more<\/p>\n

On London, on the Thames, on Kent and Somerset,<\/p>\n

On all the places I had known of old.<\/p>\n

And from my far height I looked, and lo,<\/p>\n

In the great city lay the streets, the towers,<\/p>\n

And how the living things were swarming there!<\/p>\n

And I beheld the men, the women, too,<\/p>\n

How, like the young of things that lived in earth,<\/p>\n

And in the waters, and in the air,<\/p>\n

They swarmed and grew. And I beheld the flowers<\/p>\n

Of which I had grown weary with delight,<\/p>\n

And pined for them, and for my forest home,<\/p>\n

As I had never done before; but now,<\/p>\n

Now they were changed to me, their hues were dull<\/p>\n

And faded, they appeared to me but weeds<\/p>\n

Of the earth, rank, odious, poisonous weeds.<\/p>\n

And other flowers I saw, but not like these,<\/p>\n

The flowers that grew beside my childhood’s home;<\/p>\n

And these were fair and sweet, though not like these,<\/p>\n

And sweet and fair they still must ever be<\/p>\n

In the remotest corners of my brain.<\/p>\n

So, from my foreign height, I looked and pined<\/p>\n

For what was left of all the world I had known,<\/p>\n

For what was left of my own beautiful<\/p>\n

Green fields and lovely woods and hills of home.<\/p>\n

And suddenly I saw men dig a pit,<\/p>\n

And suddenly I saw them bury therein<\/p>\n

A living thing; and suddenly I saw<\/p>\n

The living thing begin to struggle there.<\/p>\n

And suddenly I saw men cast lots,<\/p>\n

And suddenly I saw the living thing<\/p>\n

Cast into the pit again to die.<\/p>\n

And suddenly the living thing was I,<\/p>\n

And suddenly the air was London air,<\/p>\n

And suddenly the pit was London earth,<\/p>\n

And suddenly the men were London men.<\/p>\n

And suddenly I knew that I was there,<\/p>\n

And suddenly I knew that I was here,<\/p>\n

And suddenly I knew that I was everywhere.<\/p>\n

And suddenly I knew that I was nothing,<\/p>\n

And suddenly I knew that I was everything,<\/p>\n

And suddenly I knew that I was nowhere.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The following is a poem generated by GPT-3. The text in bold is the prompt that I entered; the rest was generated by a machine. I discuss this text in my article “The Datafication of Culture: Romanticism and AI-Generated Poetry.”   Tintern Abbey \u00a0 By Tantalus Greenville   Confused, distracted\u2014still the feverish thirst For Nature … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeffreymbinder.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeffreymbinder.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeffreymbinder.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeffreymbinder.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeffreymbinder.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=354"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jeffreymbinder.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":415,"href":"https:\/\/jeffreymbinder.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354\/revisions\/415"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeffreymbinder.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeffreymbinder.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeffreymbinder.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}