In a previous article I wrote about asking ChatGPT to write a poem in the style of A. A. Milne. This time, lets see how it did:
ChatGPT wrote me a poem about Pooh. I was thinking of and hoping for an imitation of one of the poems in When We Were Very Young or Now We Are Six, not about Pooh in particular, but I didn’t specify so I will take what the bot gave me. Here is what ChatGPT wrote:
Trees. Because ChatGPT wrote a poem about trees. Sort of.
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
With his friends, he likes to play
In the Hundred Acre Wood all day
Tigger bounces with great glee
And Piglet hides behind a tree
Rabbit hops around with pride
While Eeyore sits and mopes aside
But they're all friends, you see
In this wonderful land of make-believe
They have adventures, big and small
And they never seem to tire at all
From searching for honey in a hive
To just enjoying a simple drive
So if you're feeling down and blue
Just remember Pooh and his crew
For in their world, there's always fun
And life is never truly done.
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:
Winnie-the-Pooh and all admiring the North Pole.
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 | a- ONE-two-three | ONE-two-three | ONE
They ALL - went | OFF to dis | COVer the | POLE
That first foot cheats a little, by placing an unstressed syllable before the first stressed one, and also letting us feel an imaginary unstressed syllable, and the last foot has just one stressed syllable.
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.
On the other hand, in the bot’s poem:
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
da da DA | da DA | da DA | da DA
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. 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
This 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. Look at the last line:
Sing Hey! for Owl and Rabbit and all!
In this line it might seem like the HEY is just there for the metre, because interjections might feel like filler, but it isn't. Milne 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.
Next time we’ll talk about rhyme!