Burning Bright- Blake in the Age of AI

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Published on Feb 28, 2023

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William Blake is one of the most celebrated poets in English literature, and his poem, The Tyger, is one of the most famous of all time with its energetic opening line:

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;

Like a spell, the poem conjures up visions of the tiger’s terrifying and majestic beauty. The poem is part of a larger body of work published in two volumes as the Songs of Innocence and the Songs of Experience. The Tyger poem appears in the latter.

Most of the analysis of this poem focuses on the thematic meaning in terms of its religious connotations. The counterpart to the Tyger appears in the Songs of Innocence and is called The Lamb. Contrary to the fieriness of the Tyger, the Lamb poem is soft and beautiful. The narrators keeps asking it who made thee, little lamb? as it dotes over the paradisical beauty of the lamb. The Tyger, on the other hand, conjures up visions of strength, dangerous beauty, and power beyond one’s comprehension. It shows astonishment at the hand or eye capable of creating this fearsome creature. The poet seems perplexed by the dichotomy of existence that represents heaven and hell. How can someone who created the Lamb also create the Tyger? The question is incessant to the point that one begins to have doubts about the answer, who made thee, how, and why?

In the 1960’s, various counter-cultures rediscovered William Blake. His verses were visionary, accompanied by visual art created by Blake himself, given that he was also a painter and printmaker. His paintings have that psychedelic aesthetic popular in the 60s, and his verses resonated with the young botanical explorers of the era.

I created a few AI pieces using Stable Diffusion with the prompt being the first two lines of the poem, quoted in the introduction. I played around with the prompt settings until I got some half-decent creations. I then imported the art into Clipchamp. Using the text-to-speech function I added each stanza, which consisted of four lines. This allowed me to vary the speed of the voice throughout the poem, so it didn't ’t sound too monotonous. This mimics how a poet would read his or her work, modulating their speech based on the emotions evoked. The text at the bottom of the screen was done with a text filter appropriately called smoke. I added a transition between the images for smooth flow. There was a little bit of adjustment to do to get the different elements (text, audio, and art) to sync just right. I could’ve tightened things here and there, but I think that for an afternoon experiment, it’s not too shabby. I hope you enjoyed it.