Deep Learning

Deep Learning
It was not Truth - I looked it up -
The oracles were dumb -
It was no Lie - the Sky was pierced
And Revelation came -

It was not Knowledge - in my Ears
The Consonance - resolved -
Nor Intuition - fingertips
Revolved in Nacre grooves.

Still, it reflected like them all.
The Figures on the screen
Were ordered ranks of Theories
From Clouds above - my own -

As if the night were shaken,
And shifted from its bed,
And bent to seek a deeper Sea -
It was the broad noon, made

Of gathering and sorting out
The fine dull grains of life -
And fusing them to phosphors
That flood Unseeing Sight -

But most like Destiny - arrived
Without a paw to hear -
Or nose - or whisker - or a Thought -
Above the miles of air.
21 October 2021
Parody of “It was not Death” by Emily Dickinson. Johnson number 510, Franklin number 355.

My parody draws meaning from its original, so it helps to understand what the original means. Unfortunately, the original is difficult to understand. I’ve seen a number of analyses of the Emily Dickinson poem online, and to me they all read like nonsense. It is a poem about the Christian resurrection of the dead, and it seems to me that the details of the poem hang together only under that interpretation. It is both deeply invested in Christian mythology and deeply original—and horrified—about what it means.

I did not even try to reproduce the superlunary desolation of Dickinson’s last stanza. I wish I had that greatness.