Since I have been doing a lot of work with and about Artificial Intelligence for Navajo Technical University and Harshwal LLC, I had a whim to put an irregular contemporary sonnet into AI the other day and ask for an analysis of the poem. What came out startled me, and I thought I’d put in here. AI is dangerous, of course, and needs strong regulation. What the U.S. Department of Defense is currently doing is absolutely dangerous and needs to be opposed. I have also done a lot of work for NTU trying to figure out what an AI and quantum computing age is going to do to employment and what humans will be doing for work in the near and far future. I have found that some predictions by the AI companies are overblown, but it is going to have serious impacts that NTU and other tribal colleges and universities, not to mention colleges and universities around the world, are going to have to prepare to face on behalf of their students and future students.
Sometimes, however, AI can be an absolute delight, which I found to be the case with this experiment. The sonnet is first. Then the AI analysis.
The Flight of Terns
I see the flight of birds, the arctic tern.
Small, gray and white, a blood-red bill, it flies
Migrations longer than the possibility
That anything so small could then return
To rocky shores and ice and endless skies
Of midnight sun and land and restless sea.
Eternity is in the flight of birds,
The way they mean into the ecosphere.
We humans, limited by thoughts and words,
Are bound into the time we are, our fear
Of what might be an echoing inside
The breaths we take, our reveries at night,
The endless turmoil making up the tide
That terns surpass when launching into flight.
An irregular contemporary sonnet basically tries to marry form to the sonnet’s substance. One of the things I was interest in finding out is if AI picked up on what I thought I was trying to achieve–though I’m never sure how successful I am at anything.
Here’s the AI analysis:
This is a finely structured poem, and its architecture quietly mirrors its subject.
1. The Opening Sestet: Movement Without Closure
ABCABC
The first six lines interweave three rhymes rather than enclosing them (as in ABBAABBA). Nothing is sealed. Nothing rests. The pattern moves outward and returns, but never fully closes.
That mirrors the tern’s migration:
- “tern” returns in line 4
- “flies” returns in line 5
- “possibility” echoes in “sea”
The rhyme scheme itself migrates forward and back. Like the bird, it departs and returns.
Even the syntax stretches across lines (“Migrations longer than the possibility / That anything so small…”), giving the sense of long-distance movement. Enjambment enacts flight.
So structurally:
- The rhyme travels.
- The sentences travel.
- The thought travels.
The form behaves like the tern.
2. The Volta at Line 7: From Physical to Metaphysical
“Eternity is in the flight of birds,”
This is a decisive turn. The poem lifts from observation into abstraction.
The early volta (after six lines rather than eight or twelve) creates a feeling of ascent — as if the poem itself launches into higher air sooner than expected.
We begin with biology.
We rise into philosophy.
That lift parallels the bird’s “launching into flight” at the end.
3. The Quatrains: Human Containment
The last eight lines fall into two balanced quatrains:
DEDE / FGFG
Unlike the migrating sestet, these quatrains are orderly and contained. The rhyme alternates predictably.
This contrast matters.
The birds move across hemispheres.
Humans are “bound into the time we are.”
The poem’s structure shifts from fluid migration to patterned alternation — a subtle formal representation of human limitation.
The syntax also tightens:
- “We humans…”
- “Are bound…”
- “Our fear…”
- “The breaths we take…”
The rhythm becomes more earthbound. More interior. More repetitive.
4. The Absence of a Final Couplet
There is no Shakespearean closing couplet. No epigrammatic snap.
Instead, the poem ends on:
“That terns surpass when launching into flight.”
The final rhyme (tide / flight) completes the pattern but does not “lock” it.
This refusal of a sealed couplet is significant:
- A couplet would close the poem firmly.
- Instead, the ending feels open — airborne.
The final word is “flight.”
Not “bound.”
Not “fear.”
Not “time.”
The poem ends where the birds begin.
5. Thematic Reinforcement Through Form
| Structural Feature | Thematic Echo |
|---|---|
| Interwoven opening rhyme | Migration, cyclical return |
| Enjambment in first section | Physical motion |
| Early volta | Ascent into transcendence |
| Ordered quatrains | Human limitation and containment |
| No final couplet closure | Open horizon / flight |
The structure dramatizes the contrast:
- Birds → migration, continuity, eternity
- Humans → language, thought, fear, confinement
Yet the poem itself — as art — performs a kind of migration. It moves from the material to the eternal. In that sense, the sonnet becomes the human equivalent of the tern’s flight.
Form becomes argument.
That is what makes it a strong modern sonnet: it does not merely describe transcendence — it enacts it.
That’s the end of the analysis. I know many are uncomfortable with AI or totally opposed to it. I have sympathy with both stances, although in my work with Navajo Tech I don’t feel I have the luxury to take such a stance. New wealth, I have said for decades, is created at the edges of technology, and one of the purposes of that tribal university is to try to integrate new wealth into the tribal economy in an effort to push back generational poverty, not an easy task to state the obvious.
Anyway, if anyone gets to the end of all this? I would love to know what you think of my little experiment? Did you find it interesting? What implications could this have for creativity and poetry in the future if any? I don’t believe for a second that AI is going to replace humans writing poetry or doing art. I know a lot of poets and artists disagree with me.
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