Thread by @doctormoffett

Comparing a ChatGPT poem "in the style of" a poet to a real poem by that poet, not to slag on chatbots, but to demonstrate some of the things that make good poetry good. A thread.

#PoetryClass

Now, if you play with ChatGPT and poetry at all, you'll find that it really really likes to make poems rhyme, even when you tell it not to. So in order to make a more interesting comparison I'm going to choose a poet who is very rhymey: A. A. Milne.

I really love Milne's verse for children, but you might think it's among the easiest for a bot to recreate, because his poetry tends to be strictly formal in its rhythm and rhyme, which should be something a machine can recreate.

Milne's poetry also doesn't tend to be especially complex or abstract in its imagery. So I'm giving the bot some advantages, I feel. Let's see what it gives me.

I'm doing this in real time, so I don't know yet what it's going to write or what I'm going to say about it.

Well it made me a poem about Pooh, which is not what I was hoping for. It also went on a bit, so I'm just going to show the first three stanzas. But here you go.

I was thinking of the poems in "When We Were Very Young" or "Now We Are Six," but whatever. Let's compare this generated poem with one of Milne's actual ones. I'm going to use the first one I thought of, which is the poem about discovering the North Pole, from "Winnie-The-Pooh":

Milne's actual poem divided between this tweet and the next, but there's no actual stanza break:

They all went off to discover the Pole,
Owl and Piglet and Rabbit and all;
It’s a Thing you Discover, as I’ve been tole
By Owl and Piglet and Rabbit and all.

Eeyore, Christopher Robin and Pooh
And Rabbit’s relations all went too⁠—
And where the Pole was none of them knew.⁠ ⁠…
Sing Hey! for Owl and Rabbit and all!

The first and to me most obvious thing to contrast here is metre and rhyme. Let's do metre and rhythm first.

I'm guessing if you're reading this at all you already know the basics of the language of poetic metre, but let's just cover it so we all know where we are.

English poetic metre depends on patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables. That's why we call Shakespeare's usual verse PENTAmeter even though it "penta" means "five" and it usually has ten syllables: because it has five STRESSED syllables.

Or more accurately, five little packages of stressed and unstressed. We call each package of stressed and unstressed a "foot"

If you're unclear about stressed and unstressed, think about the difference between "refuse" the noun, meaning garbage, where the stress is on the first syllable, and "refuse" the verb, meaning deny, where the stress is on the second syllable. Stress can really affect meaning.

Anyway. Milne's first line: "They all went off to discover the Pole" has ten syllables, but they're not all stressed. It's sing-songy, and the stressed syllables are ALL, OFF, COV and POLE.

You could say it as:

THEY all went OFF to disCOVer the POLE

And that might fit a strict theoretical poetic metre better, since we have ONE two three ONE two three ONE two three ONE with an felt (two three) after the word POLE, but I don't think that's actually the metre here.

I definitely want to stress the ALL, which means the metrical pattern is

a-ONE--three ONE-two-three ONE-two-three ONE

Those first two feet cheat a little, by placing an unstressed syllable before the first stressed one, and also letting us feel an imaginary unstressed syllable.

And the next line is:

Owl and Piglet and Rabbit and all

which also has four stressed syllables, and they're

OWL and PIGlet and RABbit and ALL

Again we are missing an expected unstressed syllable in the first foot, and the last foot is only the stressed syllable.

Without showing you every line, let me just say let me just say that every line of the poem ends with a foot that is a single stressed syllable, there are always four feet, most of them are dactyls (DA-da-da), but he drops unstressed syllables several more times.

The first line of the ChatGPT poem is:

"In the woods, the trees do grow"

This is also four feet:

"IN the WOODS the TREES do GROW"

The metre here might seem like it's trochic (DA-da) but it's actually iambic (da-DA), with the first foot missing an unstressed syllable.

Most of the poem follows that pattern, except for this line:

"Who's always up for something new"

where the first foot is an iamb because the "who's" is unstressed...

and the lines:

In the HUNdred ACRE WOOD all DAY

and

But THEY'RE all FRIENDS, YOU SEE
In this WONderful LAND of MAKE-beLIEVE

Now, I'll get back to these three lines, because they're very clunky in ways I can show you, especially the line about being friends. But first I want to something more basic about the metre.

Both Milne and the bot drop unstressed syllables sometimes, but Milne's metre feels much more natural. Why?

Compare the first lines:

They all went off to discover the Pole,

vs

In the woods, the trees do grow

The bot is following a formal metre more strictly than Milne is.

So why does it feel like the bot's metre is bad here and Milne's is good?

Firstly, the trisyllabic pattern of Milne feels more sing-songy, than the disyllabic one of the bot, so we feel the rhythm more strongly and it's easy to unconsciously add beats when necessary.

Also, Milne uses the rhythm of speech to his advantage. He doesn't turn an unstressed or ambiguous syllable into a stressed one just to fit the metre. We could say "They ALL went OFF to DIScovER the POLE" and turn this into pentameter, but we'd have to pronounce discover weird.

But "IN the WOODS the TREES do GROW" is one possible pattern for the bot's line, but we could also say "in the WOODS the TREES do GROW" and lose a foot. And maybe that would be better, because we wouldn't naturally stress that "IN" if we were saying it in regular speech.

So how do I know that the bot isn't writing three feet per line instead of four? Because as we go on if we're reading it with three feet we get more and more lines that trip us up or have unnatural metre.

We'd have to read this line:

Who's always UP for SOMEthing NEW

Three unstressed syllables to rush toward that UP are too many, and in natural speech we want to stress the AL of ALways.

And this kind of calculation and figuring, where we are unsure what the metre is at first because it's ambiguous, is what bad metre feels like.

I said that Milne's first line COULD be either

They ALL went OFF to disCOVer the POLE

or

THEY all went OFF to disCOVer the POLE

but notice how either way the metre of the rest of the line works and there's no ambiguity about the number of feet. We feel that four-pulse.

Milne also never adds an unstressed syllable to make it fit the metre. He'll drop an unstressed syllable and mess with the metre a little, but never add one and never add an unnecessary unstressed syllable to FIT the metre.

In

They ALL went OFF to disCOVer the Pole,

we could drop the "all" or the "off" and the sense would pretty much survive, but those are both stressed syllables, which means metrically they are non-negotiable. That means that they FEEL necessary.

The bot's first line:

IN the WOODS, the TREES do GROW

has a totally unnecessary "do". It's unnecessary for meaning, and even is unnatural usage. We don't say trees do grow in English we just say trees grow. But it's there to make the metre fit better.

I said I would get back to these three lines from the bot:

In the HUNdred ACre WOOD all DAY
...
But THEY'RE ALL FRIENDS, you SEE
In this WONderful land of MAKE-belLIEVE

All three have metrical problems.

The first one suddenly adds an extra unstressed syllable.

In the HUNdred ACre WOOD all DAY

That's not the biggest issue in the world, but Milne doesn't do it. Like I said, he drops syllables but doesn't add them.

That "in the" makes the line feel rushed, and it's also ambiguous, because we want to stress the IN, since we did in the first line, but if we do we'll end up with five feet, or else we'll have to cram extra syllables in the second foot by making it "HUNdred acre".

The next one:

But THEY'RE ALL FRIENDS, you SEE

puts three stressed syllables next to each other. You can drop an unstressed syllable now and then, but Milne never gives us a foot with no unstressed syllables at all.

We also, in natural speech, don't want to stress the THEY.

So this line is a metrical mess. We have to force it into the pattern by breaking the rules of BOTH the pattern AND natural pronunciation.

And finally:

In this WONderful LAND of MAKE-beLIEVE

isn't as bad as the last one, but also adds extra unstressed syllables, and messes with the stress unstress pattern.

Milne's metre never misses like this. I'm not going to go line by line, but check it and see. There's no line where you're unsure where the stress should go, no line where he adds words or syllables only to meet the metrical requirements.

Even the last line:

"Sing Hey! for Owl and Rabbit and all!" might seem like the HEY is just there for the metre, because interjections might feel like filler, but it isn't.

He chooses a one-syllable stressed interjection with no filler unstressed syllables even though the metre expects an unstressed syllable there, because there's a pause after "Hey!" that functions as an unstressed syllable.

Then there's the rhyme.

Milne's rhyme scheme is

ABABCCCA:

... the Pole,
... and all;
... been tole
... and all.
... and Pooh
... all went too⁠—
... them knew.⁠ ⁠…
... and all!

The bot's rhyme scheme is

AABB CCDD EEFF, or we could say AABB for each stanza

... do grow
... and slow
... named Pooh
... thing new

... to play
... all day
... great glee
... a tree

... with pride
... aside
... you see
... believe

There's nothing inherently wrong with AABB CCDD EEFF, but mixing up the pattern like Milne does is definitely more interesting.

We could pick on the weak rhyme of "see" and "believe" in the third stanza, but really I want to pick on all the OTHER rhymes here.

The bot chooses banal and obvious rhymes almost always.

What do I mean banal and obvious?

The content of the poem is determined by the need to rhyme.

In the woods, the trees do grow
And the stream flows nice and slow
There's a little bear named Pooh
Who's always up for something new

Why are we mentioning that trees grow. Isn't that obvious?

But it's to rhyme with the "slow" in the next line.

And why is Pooh up for something new? Is there going to be adventure or novelty in this poem?

No, it's to rhyme with "Pooh".

Tigger bounces with great glee
And Piglet hides behind a tree

"Glee" is a weird word here. It's almost right, but not quite, but it rhymes with tree.

Most of the rhymes are simple true rhymes of one-syllable words. "Pride/aside" and "see/believe" are the exceptions.

"Aside" really makes no sense in the line:

"While Eeyore sits and mopes aside"

What it means is Eeyore is on the sidelines. But that's not really what "aside" means. But it rhymes with pride.

And I don't mind the rhyme of "see/believe" except that in the lines:

But they're all friends, you see
In this wonderful land of make-believe

the "you see" is awkward and doesn't really make senes. It's just there to rhyme with "believe" but it DOESN'T rhyme with "believe".

Compare actual Milne. His rhyming groups are:

Pole/tole, all/all/all, Pooh/too/knew

All/all/all is a chorus. It's not just a rhyming end, the whole line is almost the same each time. That creates cohesion and playfulness, and makes the whole thing feel like a song.

That playfulness is the opposite of a forced rhyme.

Next we have Pooh/too/knew:

Eeyore, Christopher Robin and Pooh
And Rabbit’s relations all went too⁠—
And where the Pole was none of them knew.⁠ ⁠…

This moment is a change in the rhyme scheme, so none of these rhymes feel predictable or expected.

We expect another "Owl and Piglet and Rabbit and all" after "Pooh", but instead Milne changes the rhyme pattern and also ties the line "Eeyore, Christopher Robin and Pooh" and the next one to the refrain line by expanding on its meaning.

Milne uses the inertia of meaning to carry us through the change in the rhyme scheme, and then the inertia of the rhyme scheme to carry us through the next change in meaning.

And finally, "Pole/tole" is definitely a forced rhyme, but it's a freely and playfully forced rhyme instead of a banal and obvious one. "Tole" for "told" is funny.

It doesn't read like Milne couldn't think of a rhyme, it reads like he is playing with vocabulary and sounds as a joke.

And there's the next level of analysis we could add to the comparison. So far I've entirely focused on formal considerations, which really is the thing a computer should be best at because it's made up of straightforward rules.

But Milne is fun and funny, and the bot is boring.

The key to humour, above all, is surprise. Milne's poem isn't bust-a-gut laughing funny, but it is smile-worthy, because of moments like "Pole/tole" and the repeated refrain, and the "It's a Thing you Discover" and the "Sing Hey!"

And surprise is a key to good poetry that isn't trying to be funny, also. In content, the two things that make a poem good (that make any literature good) are the conflicting pulls of familiarity and surprise.

We get pleasure from reading something that we already know, that we recognize, that reminds us of the shared nature of human experience. But we also get pleasure from reading something we didn't already know. A new insight, or perspective.

In terms of content, the Milne poem isn't saying anything profound. They went to find the pole, they went all together, they didn't know where it was... yay!

But it DOES have a narrative that goes somewhere, a tight focus, and several moments of surprise or reversal.

There is more to be said, but I think that's enough for now. I enjoyed myself a lot, and I hope some of you found this at least a little bit interesting!

If anyone enjoyed this, I will happily do it again some day. Let me know!

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