LIKE A MAN FROM A DIFFERENT WORLD
play as if you know
two were here before you
think back long as you can goplace it where you want to
we need a hand
great to be with youform a new land
long was the day
from water to landpeople get out of the way
why ask me
of these people what can we say
The poem is surprisingly coherent, particularly when the generator fills the rhyme with a line that ends with the same word, as is the case with the third stanza. Perhaps the result is a fortunate one that works well conceptually from the title to the last line, describing a man who wishes to live in isolation, building a land to get away from people. Perhaps we are willing to create short causal chains, particularly when the lines make such recursive use of common words.
Sonnets are trickier because while their rhyme schemes are simple to replicate, the rhetorical progression is more difficult, particularly the volta. In the Petrarchan sonnet, the first 8 lines are meant to present an idea with the 9th line offering a sharp rhetorical turn that is explored in the remaning 5 lines. A random one should provide some insight.
AWAY FROM ME
on her need would he try his kind hand
said way out there man
way out there man
place the letter in my hand
and you move through the land
sentence the boy as a man
word as the work of man
or we could set out for a new land
name all who you know
like you were in me
there will come a day
her look was such that he would not know
answer me
they take our people away
Does the rhyme scheme seem a bit too repetitive? I suspect the program randomly chose two similar rhymes and churned out a poem that creates an inadvertent volta just from the pleasure of getting away from the rhyme in the first eight lines, though its repetition of words does help keep the lines conceptually focused. Will this work with the Spenserian sonnet and its interlocking rhyme scheme closed by a couplet?
THINK ABOUT WHAT YOU TRY TO DO TO ME
find another to give it to you
why ask me
most of all I need you
would you like to see
follow me
word as the work of man
thing that you can tell me
study and learn to be a good man
word as the work of man
read him the letter
he will help when he can
answer my letter
first there is a sound
has he been around
The rhyme scheme across stanzas build momentum much like terza rima, with repetitiveness creating conceptual bridges with rhymes that might make you want to jump off from them. The selection algorithm prevents accidental rhyme repetition, so the couplet at the end at least offers a refreshing rhyme variation, if not necessarily a volta.
The Shakespearean sonnet… wait a minute, Rettberg didn’t publish any in “Frequency.” But he did design the program with that famous type in mind:
- He wrote only 7 rhyme variables: just enough to to get to the Shakespearean GG couplet. And he only gets as far as using E rhymes in the generated poems.
- He wrote a subroutine to produce them, readable in the Ruby program below:
shakespearian = Proc.new do
puts ‘———————————————————’
puts frequency[rand(200)][rand(10)].upcase
puts
puts A[rand(A.length)]
puts ’ ’ + B[rand(B.length)]
puts ’ ’ + B[rand(B.length)]
puts ’ ’ + A[rand(A.length)]
puts C[rand(C.length)]
puts ’ ’ + D[rand(D.length)]
puts ’ ’ + D[rand(D.length)]
puts ’ ’ + C[rand(C.length)]
puts E[rand(E.length)]
puts ’ ’ + F[rand(F.length)]
puts ’ ’ + F[rand(F.length)]
puts ’ ’ + E[rand(E.length)]
puts G[rand(G.length)]
puts G[rand(G.length)]
puts ‘———————————————————’
end
Why didn’t he generate them? Is it because his lines aren’t in iambic pentameter and they wouldn’t sound like a sonnet? Is the constraint of posing an idea that gets elaborated with a minor volta and a couplet that transforms the whole poem too much to leave to chance? Was the Bard’s name too much of a reminder of the richness of his vocabulary versus the “base units of language” displayed here?
Perhaps it’s better to add some sonnets into the mix, but not so many that the reader tires of them. A little sonnet goes a long way, and this experiment seems to be more successful at shorter and simpler pieces.
Featured in: The “Frequency” Series
