As a creative person who can’t draw, I can’t always depict the gorgeous imagery that Shakespeare uses in his poems and plays, so I often resort to AI artwork to do it for me. If you’ve been here a while, you know I’ve used NightCafe to imagine Shakespeare characters as, Harry Potter, Disney Princesses, Star Wars, and others.

https://dosinga.medium.com/visualizing-poetry-using-dall-e-ff3a901a0d4e

I love to use AI to put pop cultural characters in a Shakespearean context, but until today, I never thought of using AI to interpret Shakespeare directly, until I read this article from Medium.com. The author, Douwe Osinga, has used the AI website DALL-E to create text-to-image artwork in order to show the viewer the imagery that various poets use in their poems. Here’s what he did for Shakespeare’s famous sonnet 118.

https://douwe.com/projects/the_ai_not_taken?selected=Shall_I_compare_thee_to_a_summers_day

Here’s some art that I created through AI based on Sonnet 55:

Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone besmeared with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
’Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
    So, till the Judgement that yourself arise,
 
    You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.

I didn’t tell the NightCafe software what to draw; I just put the text of the sonnet. What I find interesting is that the AI assumed I was writing a poem to a beautiful woman, and chose to represent the first line of the poem by placing her in a graveyard. I also love the withered branch, prominently placed over the moon. It reminds me of a scythe- the symbol of decay and death.

I wish the AI had chosen to represent Mars or the flaming sword mentioned in the poem, but it does get some of the central images right.

Using AI to visualize poetry is a useful exercise when you’re teaching Shakespeare because it demonstrates how poets can use multiple allusions, personifications, and many other literary devices.