Prompting Google’s Bard to write a poem about Ted Hughes in the voice of Sylvia Plath

When I opened up my Google search engine this morning, I was given the option to experiment with Google’s chatbot, named “Bard.” I had experimented with ChatGPT, another chatbot, before, with mixed results. I was interested in whether or not Bard could do better. Both Bard and ChatGPT are large language models developed to have simulated conversations with humans. I wanted to know how close Bard could come to the actual, rather than the simulated.

Immediately, a prompt came to mind: I would prompt Bard to write me a poem about the English poet Ted Hughes in the voice of American poet Sylvia Plath.

Hughes and Plath met in 1956 when they were both students at Cambridge University, in England. Hughes was British and Plath was a New Englander, in the U.K. on a Fulbright Scholarship. By all accounts, they instantly fell in love. Soon after, they married and had two children. As has been noted elsewhere, Hughes wrote poems about animals—about predators—while Plath often wrote from the perspective of the victim. In Plath’s “Daddy,” she weaves together her own fraught relationship with her father, who she initially adored, to that between a Jewish prisoner and a Nazi guard. It’s the combination of the political and the personal that has always attracted me to that poem. I have a more sober relationship with the poems of Ted Hughes whose poem, “The Thought Fox” is one of my favorites. (I think it’s one of the best poems about literary creation ever written.) There was nothing sober, of course, about the relationship between Plath and Hughes, as their relationship ended with Plath’s suicide in 1963. Their relationship, her suicide, and the poetry that they have produced have inspired hundreds of biographies—often casting Hughes as predator and victim—and a feature film starring Gwyneth Paltrow as Plath and Daniel Craig as Hughes.

In previous posts about ChatGPT, I have tried to get the chatbot to speculate about what the decadent French poet Charles Baudelaire would say to the Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley (renowned for his children’s verse) in conversation. I also tried to get ChatGPT to give me French philosopher Michel Foucault’s perspective on self-help guru Jordan Peterson. Both of these prompts produced serviceable, if fairly shallow and surface-level, analyses in response. But when I tried to have ChatGPT write me a poem about cats in the voice of the notoriously opaque poet John Ashbery, it returned to me a poem that, with its aabb rhyme scheme and Hallmark Card sentimentality, felt like it had been written in 1873 rather than 2023. I left that conversation feeling that ChatGPT might know something about poetry in a general sense, but not in the particular kinds of languages that Ashbery was incorporating in his verse.

So those were the questions I had in my mind before I prompted Bard to channel Sylvia Plath, so to speak:

Ted Hughes

The black dog of your heart gnaws at my bones,
I cannot sleep, I cannot dream,
I am haunted by your eyes, your mouth, your bones,
I am haunted by your love, your hate, your screams.

Your poems are like knives, they cut me deep,
They open up my soul, they show me hell,
I am drowning in your words, I am lost, I am weak,
I am drowning in your love, your hate, your spell.

You are a magician, a sorcerer, a beast,
You are a god, you are a devil, you are a dream,
I am yours, I am yours, I am yours, I am yours,
I am yours, I am yours, I am yours, I am yours.

Having read this poem a dozen times now, I wondered if Bard, in formulating its response, read Hughes’ 1998 book of poems Birthday Letters—about his relationship with Plath—in the fraction of a second that it took to formulate its response. It’s a strange, powerful poem, made all the more powerful by its repetitions, dreamlike imagery and visions of unrequited love—and/or hate. What do you think? Are you as struck by this poem as I am?

P.S.

Just as I published this blog, I figured I’d go to ChatGPT with the same prompt:

Oh Ted, my love, my heart's undoing,
Your words, your touch, forever pursuing,
A bond so strong, but now so broken,
By your betrayal, my trust awoken.

Your hawk, your fox, your animals wild,
Their beauty and strength, you reconciled,
In your poetry, a world revealed,
But in our marriage, wounds unhealed.

Your dark gaze, your brooding ways,
A fascination, a dangerous maze,
I was drawn in, I couldn't resist,
But your love was a venom, that I had missed.
Oh Ted, my love, my soul's demise,

Your infidelity, a thousand lies,
A final blow, my spirit shattered,
My life cut short, my dreams scattered.
In my writing, my pain expressed,

A legacy, my heart confessed,
And though you lived,
you'll always be,
A part of my heart, a haunting memory.

So there you have it. The ChatGPT version gets some details right, about the subjects Hughes wrote about and his infidelity, for example, and some nice lines; “But your love is a venom that I had missed.” But it also had the sing-songy Victorian quality that I noted in my other ChatGPT prompts, such as inverted syntax.

Playing around with ChatGPT made me think, at least for the moment, that large language models were not capable of writing poems on par with the best humans have to offer. With Bard, however, I’m not so sure.