Edwin's re-sonnets

Email today from Edwin Williams:

I constructed "new" sonnets from Shakespeare's sonnets by this formula: from a set of 7 randomly selected Shakespeare sonnets (a…g) I made a new sonnet "a b a b c d c d e f e f g g", which means, the first line is taken from the first line of sonnet a, the second line from sonnet the second line of sonnet b, etc. So no two adjacent lines were from the same sonnet, except the last two. I made 154 of these (same number as S made).

I did it for fun but was startled by the result–the new sonnets were sonnetlike, felt syntactically coherent, and begged for interpretation. People I sent them to were fascinated by them, even when they saw what I had done, or after I told them. One of them, Craig Dworkin, a poet I got to know when he was at Princeton in the 90s, asked to include them in his e-poetry site, and there they sit: http://eclipsearchive.org/projects/EDWIN/.

One example:

No more be grieved at that which thou hast done, Breathed forth the sound that said 'I hate', Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun, But when she saw my woeful state, Our dates are brief, and therefore we admire, To kiss the tender inward of thy hand, And rather make them born to our desire, At the wood's boldness by thee blushing stand. So is the time that keeps you as my chest And dumb presagers of my speaking breast, To make some special instant special-blest, More than that tongue that more hath more expressed. Lest the wise world should look into your moan, And mock you with me after I am gone.

Edwin's comment:

I don't really understand why they feel so coherent. Part of it is just that syntactic boundaries tend to align with line boundaries, so that the transpositions involved tend to preserve unit-hood, and I imagine more modern sonnets wouldn't work as well. But that is not enough–I strongly believe the coherence arises from the fact that I preserved line position–if a line is #3 in the Shakespearean source, it will be #3 in the new sonnet. If so then something remains to be understood about the typical role of line 3, say, in a Shakespearean sonnet, which means there is more convention built up around the form than just the rhyme scheme. Further experiments suggest themselves but I haven't done them.

So in Edwin's honor, this morning I programmed one small further experiment, based on random line-pairs from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese. Because their rhyme scheme is a b b a c d d c e f e f e f, each composite is taken from six random sonnets rather than from seven. One example:

The face of all the world is changed, I think, To let thee sit beneath the fall of tears As salt as mine, and hear the sighing years Betwixt me and the dreadful outer brink The soul's Rialto hath its merchandize; Since first I heard the footsteps of thy soul Move still, oh, still, beside me, as they stole Receive this lock which outweighs argosies,— To these things? O Belovëd, it is plain Men could not part us with their worldly jars, And yet, because I love thee, I obtain Our hands would touch for all the mountain-bars: To live on still in love, and yet in vain,— We should but vow the faster for the stars.

And another random re-sonnet:

Thou comest! all is said without a word. Have heard this word thou hast said,—Himself, beside Thee speaking, and me listening! and replied Their happy eyelids from an unaverred Unlike are we, unlike, O princely Heart! Face to face, silent, drawing nigh and nigher, Until the lengthening wings break into fire On one another, as they strike athwart To these things? O Belovëd, it is plain With pulses that beat double. What I do And yet, because I love thee, I obtain Must taste of its own grapes. And when I sue To live on still in love, and yet in vain,— And sees within my eyes the tears of two.

A tip of the hat to Nick Montfort, along with a few examples from my program for creating passwords from sequences of three words chosen at random from the 74,286 entries in the SUBTLEXus list:

SenselesslyEnunciatedEngram InauguratesUntouchableDeadbolt DousedPervertDestroys HundredsUnwaveringlyStamping RomanticBiasesVenter NoncatastrophicExpendableSuerte CircumferenceReconfigurationRedistributed BlotchyTantricMorbidity AcceptingPermafrostFlamenco

As Edwin put it, these often "beg for interpretation", and in fact I've more than once gotten some side-eye from individuals that I've enrolled as users with one of these for an initial password.