One of the few lines of poetry I can recite from memory. In fuller context:
“Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light. …”
That came from a brilliant and all-too-human mind. Could a piece of software do the same thing? Compose a poem so full of images and experience that it would rattle readers’ memory and emotions forever? I can’t say. But Ray Kurzweil is working on the code. See the story in The New York Times.
And here’s the full text of Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill.”