Illustrated Version of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”

The Raven

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“‘Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door,
Only this, and nothing more.”

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow, vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow, sorrow for the lost Lenore,
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore,
Nameless here for evermore.

And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me, filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;
So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating,
“‘Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door,
Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door;-
This it is, and nothing more.”

Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,
“Sir,” said I, “or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;
But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,
And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,
That I scarce was sure I heard you”, here I opened wide the door;-
Darkness there, and nothing more.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore!”
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, “Lenore!”,
Merely this, and nothing more.

Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,
Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before.
“Surely,” said I, “surely that is something at my window lattice:
Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore,
Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore;,
‘Tis the wind and nothing more.”

Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,
In there stepped a stately raven of the saintly days of yore;
Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;
But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door,
Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door,
Perched, and sat, and nothing more.

Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore.
“Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,” I said, “art sure no craven,
Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the Nightly shore,
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!”
Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”

Much I marveled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,
Though its answer little meaning, little relevancy bore;
For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being
Ever yet was blest with seeing bird above his chamber door,
Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door,
With such name as “Nevermore.”

But the raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only
That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.
Nothing further then he uttered, not a feather then he fluttered,
Till I scarcely more than muttered, “other friends have flown before,
On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before.”
Then the bird said, “Nevermore.”

Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,
“Doubtless,” said I, “what it utters is its only stock and store,
Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster
Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore,
Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore
Of ‘Never, nevermore’.”

But the Raven still beguiling all my fancy into smiling,
Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust and door;
Then upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore,
What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt and ominous bird of yore

Meant in croaking “Nevermore.”

This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing
To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom’s core;
This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining
On the cushion’s velvet lining that the lamplight gloated o’er,
But whose velvet violet lining with the lamplight gloating o’er,
She shall press, ah, nevermore!

Then methought the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer
Swung by Seraphim whose footfalls tinkled on the tufted floor.
“Wretch,” I cried, “thy God hath lent thee, by these angels he hath sent thee
Respite, respite and nepenthe, from thy memories of Lenore!
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!”
Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”

“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!, prophet still, if bird or devil!,
Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,
Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted,
On this home by horror haunted, tell me truly, I implore,
Is there, is there balm in Gilead?, tell me, tell me, I implore!”
Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”

“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil, prophet still, if bird or devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us, by that God we both adore,
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore,
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.”
Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”

“Be that word our sign in parting, bird or fiend,” I shrieked, upstarting,
“Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken!, quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my
door!”
Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,
And the lamplight o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted, nevermore!

 

As an exercise, I created this illustrated version of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” using generative AI tools from Microsoft and Stability AI. None of these images is copyrighted. For a couple of other posts that include corvids in literature, see The Municipality and Huginn and Muninn as Space Ravens.

Magnolia Bloom

Magnolia Bloom

We climb the park’s tower,
my eldest brother and I.
He points out a lovely
white blossom in a tree
I identify as magnolia,
its thick green leaves shiny
with Florida sunshine.

Nearby are other blooms,
older ones, bent on decay,
white tepals yellowing,
sliding, one by one
to the forest floor,

and I think of you, mother,
who were once so splendid,
blooming and bearing the fruit of us,
ourselves now slowly wilting,
the frost of age tinging
our skin, old men maintaining

the illusion of youth only
so long as you yet lived,
a bloom we mistook
for steel, a proof against
our own mortality until the day
you dropped entirely
to the forest floor, fading
into dusk, then darkness,

leaving us shocked, aggrieved,
and afraid, knowing our own
time comes soon now.

Just as you knew me, seeing
through fading eyes, as
a callous fool saying
I’d see you anon, you
ill and angry, me
wasting precious time
on denial and work,
and doctor calls

rather than staying, your
hand in mine, waiting
with you for the fleshy parts
of your life and my fear
to fail and fall away,
and I’m sorry, Mom, sorry,
eternally, unquenchably sorry.

The old magnolia turns malignant
as my brother walks away,
whispers closely so only I can hear
that it knows I am. It knows.

 
 

For other poems, see Fiction/Poetry

Mighty Ron, Strong Ron

Mighty Ron, Strong Ron

Ron likes to brand things,
to hear the sizzle of his power
singeing then searing
the hides of others,
scenting the smoke
sweetly suffused with the suffering
of those daring to defy him.

He especially loves leaving his black
mark on wobbly-kneed youngsters
before they learn to resist
and are lost. Before
they seek solace and strength
in books or bodies, ideas or selves
that disturb Ron. Disgust him, really.

Ron brands them for their own good
(and for his, of course),
a great circle of lookers-on cheering
as Ron lifts his bony knee,
releasing the calves that dart away,
in pain, afraid, into the corral
of Ron’s staunch ranch,
his control unquestioned,
a strong and mighty man;
“Just see how strong,” they whisper.

Ron brands the old ones as well,
brands them with an ancient acid,
two parts fear, three parts rage,
five parts blinding bigotry.
Ancient, yes, but still so vividly effective;
They all receive, in fact, their branding
like a benediction.
“This will keep you safe,” he says,
“And free.” Though maimed, they cheer,
happy to now be captives
in Ron’s mighty corral.
“Ron loves liberty!” they sing,
and Ron winks, thrilled by their bleating,
despising their stink.

In the dead of night, though, mighty Ron
is fearful and frail within,
dreaming of a brimming poisonous puss
that threatens to pop off his head
as his face turns red, witnessing
a nightmare rush of crazed calves grown
and vicious, nipping, half-blind sheep
busting down Ron’s mighty corral,
turning the ranch to splinters,
masses yearning to be free,
a disastrous stampede.

Ron reels and shouts and brandishes
his once red iron, now black as death.
Stubbornly, stupidly trampled,
he explodes like a lanced boil,
spewing a noxious white goo
that cascades like slick sleet
over Ron’s once staunch ranch,
to forge an infected wasteland,
a lasting legacy of mighty Ron, strong Ron.

Featured image: Colorado. Branding calves, a photochrom print by the Detroit Photographic Co.

Christina Rossetti’s “Who Has Seen the Wind?”

Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you.
But when the leaves hang trembling,
The wind is passing through.

Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I.
But when the trees bow down their heads,
The wind is passing by.

 

Christina Rossetti’s “Who Has Seen the Wind?” is part of a project in which I’m posting poetry that’s in the public domain along with illustrations that are also sometimes from the public domain and other times from one of the new AI art generators. Essentially, I paste in the poem (or parts of the poem), see what the generator comes up with, and pick the images that seem best to me. These three particular images are from Bing and Stable Diffusion.

This seemingly simple poem is accessible to children as well as adults, but it uses the wind in a way that can be interpreted symbolicly as well as literally. On one hand, it speaks to a natural force that can be inhumanly powerful while always invisible. This seems profound and mysterious to adults as well as children. In a sense, it represents so many other phyical forces that we experience but can’t see, from gravity to most of the electromagnetic spectrum to the atomic forces that humanity has only recently discovered (and, of course, weaponized).

But the wind also represents other mysteries, from the divine to the ineffable. God is the most obvious and greatest of these symbolic forces, gentle and merciful at times, wrathful at others. The wind also serves as a symbol of other essences such as human love, so tender in serene days, so deeply passionate in more tempestuous weathers.

Cortada’s Key Deer

Cortada’s Key Deer

The deer’s pose is a trope so old
it could be painted in ochre and hematite
on the dark, irregular curves of Paleolithic skulls,
like the caves of Lascaux and Cosquer.

Its narrow head high, perked ears alert,
almond eyes forward, scanning for stalking
shadows or low rustles, poised to bound if
catching sight of reflected glass or the gleam of gunmetal.

There’s no telling the deer is tiny or tame,
evolved to fit snugly in the tight pockets of Florida’s keys,
packed in with cotton mice, ring-necked snakes,
leathery Conchs and tourists red as steamed lobsters,
their days spent skittering among the corals done.

But it’s clear this deer is something new,
abstracted into polygons, disfigured yet distilled
amid a wood of dark, circling selves,
an underbelly charred as trees after a forest burn.

Surviving or transcended, it’s infused with the fractured light
of a fragile forest clearing, coat sienna as sunset,
though with a fractured face, as if the fauvist hunter Braque
were targeting kills with kaleidoscopes.

Then the moment holds, the deer captured in amber,
facets of itself suspended and reflected in infinity,
there and not, a talisman hung on a leather cord
around the neck of a naked, horned hunting god
roaming sorrel plains, chanting ancient
songs of human extinction.

 

Author’s note: “Cortada’s Key Deer” is an ekphrastic poem based on a work of art by Xavier Cortada called “(Florida is…) Key Deer.” Click the link to see the original art.

William Blake’s “The Tyger”

The Tyger

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

When the stars threw down their spears
And water’d heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

 

 

 

William Blake’s “The Tyger” is part of a project in which I’m posting poetry that’s in the public domain along with illustrations that are also sometimes from the public domain and other times from one of the new AI art generators. Essentially, I paste in parts of the poem, see what the generator comes up with, and pick the images that seem best to me. These three particular images are from Blake himself, Bing and Stable Diffusion. I wrestled with whether or not to use Blake’s own illustration of the eponymous tiger but reluctantly decided against it. In my view, his image just doesn’t carry the same weight as the poem itself in our modern era.

Why is this poem so still so popular after over 200 years? I’m sure there are various good answers. For me, it’s the fact that, in the guise of a nursery-style rhyme, Blake gets at one of the great paradoxes of our existence. On one hand, a huge portion of humankind believes in merciful, compassionate God who sacrificed his own Son so that humanity could be spiritualy saved and literally made immortal. On the other hand, this same God, an infinitely omnipotent Being, has created a world in which brutality rather than compassion rules. In which Nature, red in tooth and claw (to quote a different poet), requires its denizens to regularly murder one another in order to survive.

Blake was, of course, writing over half a century before Darwin published his “On the Origin of Species,” which attempted to make better sense of bloody-minded Nature. And, once he did, there was a great and continuing debate about whether the idea of evolution negated the notion of a Creator, merciful or otherwise.

This tension between gorgeous but amoral and deadly Nature and humanity’s allegedly more moral universe reverberates through our lives each day. As a species, we continue to be a deeply confused and moral mess while Nature remains, in its own way, pure and beautiful as the ever rarer tigers still slip through through the forests of Asia, their eyes shining in the moonlight as they, burning with desire in the forests of the night, hunt prey that must die so they can live.

“A Jelly-Fish” by Marianne Moore

A Jelly-Fish

Visible, invisible,
A fluctuating charm,
An amber-colored amethyst
Inhabits it; your arm
Approaches, and
It opens and
It closes;
You have meant
To catch it,
And it shrivels;

You abandon
Your intent—
It opens, and it
Closes and you
Reach for it—
The blue
Surrounding it
Grows cloudy, and
It floats away
From you.

 

 


A Jelly-Fish by Marianne Moore is part of a project in which I’m posting poetry that’s in the public domain along with illustrations which are also sometimes from the public domain and other times from one of the new AI art generators. Essentially, I paste in the poem, see what the generator comes up with, and pick the images that seem best to me. These particular images are from Bing. I’ve reluctantly broken Moore’s poem into two apparent stanzas but only because I couldn’t (yet) figure out how to lay it out otherwise. The fault is mine. The original poem is single, unbroken and beautiful. All art works the way of the jelly-fish, I suppose, but Moore caught more than her share of elusive, beautiful ineffabilities.

Not Me

Not Me

There is no transfer,

no shooting of the ghost

across town or time

or species of beast.

No beaming

or streaming

through cosmic

or copper wires.

No.


I am dead,

simply,

not me.


And yet,

and yet

wherever there’s an eye,

I may be,

seeing,

being

not the same snuffed candle

but another light,

a separate flame,

maybe roaring or sputtering

or soaring,

a shot in the dark,

a spark in the sky,

not this me, never

again, no,

yet I






Featured image: Van Gogh's "Starry Night"  

The Murky Ethics of AI-generated Images

The other day, I was playing with Stable Diffusion and found myself thinking hard about the ethics of AI-generated images. Indeed, I found myself in an ethical quandary. Or maybe quandaries.

More specifically, I was playing with putting famous haiku poems into the “Generate Image” box and seeing what kinds of images the Stable Diffusion generator would concoct.

It was pretty uninspiring stuff until I started adding the names of specific illustrators in front of the haiku. Things got more interesting artistically but, from my perspective, murkier ethically. And, it made me wonder if society has yet formulated way to approach the ethics of AI-generated images today.

The Old Pond Meets the New AIs

The first famous haiku I used was “The Old Pond” by Matsuo Bashō. Here’s how it goes in the translation I found:

An old silent pond

A frog jumps into the pond—

Splash! Silence again.

At first, I got a bunch of photo-like but highly weird and often grotesque images of frogs. You’ve got to play with Stable Diffusion a while to see what I mean, but here are a a few examples:

Okay, so far, so bad. A failed experiment. But that’s when I had the bright idea of adding certain illustrators’ names to the search so the generator would be able to focus on specific portions of the reticulum to find higher quality images. For reasons that will become apparent, I’m not going to mention their names. But here are some of the images I found interesting:

Better, right? I mean, each one appeals to different tastes, but they aren’t demented and inappropriate. There was considerable trial and error, and I was a bit proud of what I eventually kept as the better ones.

“Lighting One Candle” Meets the AI Prometheus

The next haiku I decided to use was “Lighting One Candle” by Yosa Buson. Here’s how that one goes:

The light of a candle

Is transferred to another candle—

Spring twilight

This time I got some fairly shmaltzy images that you might find in the more pious sections of the local greeting card aisle. That’s not a dig at religion, by the way, but that aesthetic has never appealed to me. It seems too trite and predictable for something as grand as God. Anyway, the two images of candles below are examples of what I mean:

I like the two trees, though. I think it’s an inspired interpretation of the poem, one that I didn’t expect. It raised my opinion of what’s currently possible for these AIs. It’d make for a fine greeting card in the right section of the store.

But, still not finding much worth preserving, I went back to putting illustrators’ names in with the haiku. I thought the following images were worth keeping.

In each of these cases, I used an illustrator’s name. Some of these illustrators are deceased but some are still creating art. And this is where the ethical concerns arise.

Where Are the New Legal Lines in Generative AI?

I don’t think the legalities relating to generative AI have been completely worked out yet. Still, it looks like does appear that artists are going to have a tough time battling the against huge tech firms with deep pockets, even in nations like Japan with strong copyright laws. Here’s one quote from the article “AI-generated Art Sparks Furious Backlash from Japan’s Anime Community”:

[W]ith art generated by AI, legal issues only arise if the output is exactly the same, or very close to, the images on which the model is trained. “If the images generated are identical … then publishing [those images] may infringe on copyright,” Taichi Kakinuma, an AI-focused partner at the law firm Storia and a member of the economy ministry’s committee on contract guidelines for AI and data, told Rest of World….But successful legal cases against AI firms are unlikely, said Kazuyasu Shiraishi, a partner at the Tokyo-headquartered law firm TMI Associates, to Rest of World. In 2018, the National Diet, Japan’s legislative body, amended the national copyright law to allow machine-learning models to scrape copyrighted data from the internet without permission, which offers up a liability shield for services like NovelAI.

How About Generative AI’s Ethical Lines?

Even if the AI generators have relatively solid legal lines defining how they can work, the ethical lines are harder to draw. With the images I generated, I didn’t pay too much attention to whether the illustrators were living or dead. I was, after all, just “playing around.”

But once I had the images, I came to think that asking the generative AI to ape someone’s artistic style is pretty sleazy if that artist is still alive and earning their livelihood through their art. That’s why I don’t want to mention any names in this post. It might encourage others to add the names of those artists into image generators. (Of course, if you’re truly knowledgeable about illustrators, you’ll figure it out anyway, but in that case, you don’t need any help from a knucklehead like me.)

It’s one thing to ask an AI to use a Picasso-esque style for an image. Picasso died back in 1973. His family may get annoyed, but I very much doubt that any of his works will become less valuable due to some (still) crummy imitations.

But it’s a different story with living artists. If a publisher wants the style of a certain artist for a book cover, for example, then the publisher should damn well hire the artist, not ask a free AI to crank out a cheap and inferior imitation. Even if the copyright system ultimately can’t protect those artists legally, we can at least apply social pressure to the AI generator companies as customers.

I think AI generator firms should have policies that allow artists to opt out of having their works used to “train” the algorithms. That is, they can request to be put on the equivalent of a “don’t imitate” list. I don’t even know if that’s doable in the long run, but it might be one step in the direction of establishing proper ethics of AI-generated images.

The Soft Colonialism of Probability and Prediction?

In the article “AI Art Is Soft Propaganda for the Global North,” Marco Donnarumma takes aim at the ethics of generative AI on two primary fronts.

First is the exploitation of cultural capital. These models exploit enormous datasets of images scraped from the web without authors’ consent, and many of those images are original artworks by both dead and living artists….The second concern is the propagation of the idea that creativity can be isolated from embodiment, relations, and socio-cultural contexts so as to be statistically modeled. In fact, far from being “creative,” AI-generated images are probabilistic approximations of features of existing artworks….AI art is, in my view, soft propaganda for the ideology of prediction.

To an extent, his first concern about cultural capital is related to my previous discussion about artists’ legal and moral rights, a topic that will remain salient as these technologies evolve.

His second concern is more abstract and, I think, debatable. Probabilistic and predictive algorithms may have begun in the “Global North,” but probability is leveraged in software wherever it is developed these days. It’s like calling semiconductors part of the “West” even as a nation like Taiwan innovates the tech and dominates the space.

Some of his argument rests on the idea that generative AI is not “creative,” but that term depends entirely on how we define it. Wikipedia, for example, states, “Creativity is a phenomenon whereby something new and valuable is formed.”

Are the images created by these technologies new and valuable? Well, let’s start by asking whether they represent something new. By one definition, they absolutely do, which is why they are not infringing on copyright. On the other hand, for now they are unlikely to create truly new artistic expressions in the larger sense, as the Impressionists did in the 19th century.

As for “valuable,” well, take a look at the millions if not billions of dollars investors are throwing their way. (But, sure, there are other ways to define value as well.)

My Own Rules for Now

As I use and write about these technologies, I’ll continue to leverage the names deceased artists. But for now I’ll refrain from using images based on the styles of those stilling living. Maybe that’s too simplistic and binary. Or maybe it’s just stupid of me not to take advantage of current artistic styles and innovations. After all, artists borrow approaches from one another all the time. That’s how art advances.

I don’t know how it’s all going to work out, but it’s certainly going to require more thought from all of us. There will never be a single viewpoint, but in time let’s hope we form some semblance of consensus about what are principled and unprincipled usages of these technologies.

Featured image is from Stable Diffusion. I think I used a phrase like "medieval saint looking at a cellphone." Presto.    

Email to Kathy

Sorry to have bothered you.
After searching my house
and combing the workplace
I finally found my glasses
where I had looked five times before.

They were hidden, near invisible,
among my beach sunflowers,
to which I had carefully bowed
looking for new growth
in the midst of long drought

I think they intentionally
slipped from my shirt pocket
to lie cool in the green foliage,
resting, temporarily freed
from the furrowed frustrations
of my hot brow, so tired
of being the lenses through
which I try to focus weak
beams of thought to start
some minor fire on the page.

Now I’ve harnessed them again.
As I write you this e-mail,
they wearily serve, dreaming
of green fields of red and yellow
flowers where they can be
at peace, idly enlarging sticks and stems,
leaves and ladybugs, far from the
hum of human deliberation.

 

 

 

Featured image by Daniel Di Palma, Miami Beach – Sand Dunes Flora – Sea Grapes and Dune Sunflowers in South Beach. Wikimedia Commons.

For more poetry by Mark R. Vickers, go to Fiction/Poetry