Automated Yeats – Frank McNally discovers the joys of computerised poetry reading

Googling a Yeats poem the other day, I chanced on a website, poemhunter.com, that not only displays the text but also reads it for you, uninvited.

The reader is a computerised female American, so there are unintentionally humorous results when she encounters Irish place names or other eccentricities. Although I know it’s not mature of me, she’s my new favourite thing.

Apart from persistent trouble with knowing the right times to pause, her delivery of conventional English verse is surprisingly good. She can manage The Fiddler of Dooney, for example, quite well, except for stressing the wrong syllable in “Kilvarnet” and experiencing some general embarrassment in the environs of “Mocharabuiee”.

Where she falls down badly, however, is on such mysteries as the names Niamh (“Nyam” is her best guess), or Caoilte - an ancient Celtic warrior - which she reduces to something like “Kel”.

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When she’s faced with the opening verse of Yeats’s The Hosting of the Sidhe (“The host is riding from Knocknarea/And over the grave of Clooth-na-Bare; Caoilte tossing his burning hair,/And Niamh calling Away, come away”), it’s the poetic equivalent of a pile-up on the M50.

Naturally, I wondered if the poems of Patrick Kavanagh were on the site too. They are, including  one about the Stony Grey Soil of "Monigan".  That's an understandable mistake, maybe.  But again, you'd be surprised at some of the things that trip the computer lady up.

Getting back to Yeats, one of the revelations of his accent is its very Irishness

On A Christmas Childhood (retitled by the site as My Father Played the Melodeon), she successfully navigates "Cassiopeia was over/Cassidy's Hanging Hill", and then somehow makes two syllables out of the word "whin".  That aside, the poem is marred only by her tendency to make "Mel-O-Dion" sound a bit like an Irish cousin of Celine.

Mind you, the approach of another Burns Night led me to search the site for his work too. And the computer’s difficulty with Irish names pales alongside the tragedy that is its attempt to read the likes of Burns’s To A Mouse.

The opening lines - “Wee, sleekit, cowrin’, tim’rous beastie,/O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!” - pass without major incident. But as the abbreviations pile up, the poetry reader is gradually overwhelmed, like Hal in 2001 A Space Odyssey as he has circuits removed.

When in doubt, which is often, she’s reduced to just spelling the words. Or at the other extreme, she reaches into her own experience for an explanation, unwisely. In one instance, where Burns telescopes the words “miss it” into “miss’t”, the reader guesses this to be the abbreviation for a US state, and changes his line to an apparent warning about the dangers of accepting southern hospitality: “An’ never Mississippi Tea.”

It must be said in defence of the computerised female that Yeats’s own readings of his work are an acquired taste. He recorded several in the 1930s, and as he said in introduction, they place “great emphasis upon their rhythm”.

This sounds “strange if you are not used to it”, he added, but having taken such trouble to write his poems, “I will not read them as if they were prose”.

They certainly sound strange to modern ears, although that was the general style back then.  There’s an even older recording, from the 1890s on crackly cylinder, in which Tennyson reads The Charge of the Light Brigade with similar stridency, firing every stressed syllable like a shot from a  cannon.

In fact, there’s a bit in the middle of that where you hear a series of rapping noises. And it’s hard to know whether these were crude sound effects, or if Tennyson just had workmen in.

But getting back to Yeats, one of the revelations of his accent is its very Irishness. You might expect it to be more Big House anglo - I did - whereas he rolls his Rs (as GB Shaw also does on record) with a vengeance few of us would now.  Peace doesn’t come dropping in his version of Innisfree: it comes “dherrr-opping”.

Another surprise of the recordings is that you and I and the American computer lady having been saying “Dooney” wrong all these years.  It doesn’t rhyme with “Rooney”, according to Yeats.  It’s Doo-nay.

Shocked to realise this so belatedly, I'm still not quite willing to accept it.  On the Dooney issue, at least, I prefer the American computer's pronunciation.  And indeed, overall, her idiosyncrasies as a reader of Yeats are probably no worse than his.  The two complement each other in a weird way.  As Mark Twain said of the times displayed by his stopped watch, they average well.