“GPT-3 Paper § Figure F.1: Four Uncurated Completions from a Context Suggesting the Model Compose a Poem in the Style of Wallace Stevens With the Title ‘Shadows on the Way’”, 2020-05-28 (; similar):
As an example, in Figure F.1, we show 4 uncurated samples from a prompt suggesting that the model write a poem, with a given title, in the style of Wallace Stevens. We first experimented with a few prompts, then generated 4 samples with no additional editing or selection (sampling at temperature 1 using [nucleus sampling (HBFC19)] with P = 0.9). Completions were truncated when the model began to write a new title and author heading, or broke into prose commentary.
…“Shadows on the Way”, Wallace Stevens:
I must have shadows on the way / If I am to walk I must have / Each step taken slowly and alone / To have it ready made // And I must think in lines of grey / To have dim thoughts to be my guide / Must look on blue and green / And never let my eye forget / That color is my friend / And purple must surround me too // The yellow of the sun is no more / Intrusive than the bluish snow / That falls on all of us. I must have / Grey thoughts and blue thoughts walk with me / If I am to go away at all.
There is a way in the world. / That way a man may live in a small town / His lifetime and see no man come, / Never the stir of men about a market, / Never the bobbing of covered carts, / Never the creak passed on the stair / Closing some other life; an old man / Can prosper in that town, can prosper / When his store is seen to close, his wife / Fades in his house, and the world shouts in vain / That no one comes to hear him / Where his small bell tolls. / In that small town / Everything is known. / The ways of the young men are known, / And the ways of the young women / As they walk to the Spring; / The rumors are all known, / The quarrels, the hurt, the envy / Of the men and the women. / Till a day comes / That way out of the world / That leads to a wood. / Young, the young man / Walks, a lover now, / Knows the streets as they are and is of them.
The sun was all we had. Now, in the shade / All is changed. The mind must dwell on those / White fields, that to its eyes were always old; / Those ancient gleams, convoluting / The way they lay among the huge roots, / The great dark tomes of reverie, / The plumed labyrinth of the sea. // When our own breath gone faint and fade / Up the long stairway of the dead / We shall remember well / The blindness of the light, the whiteness / Of that white land. The footsteps, and / The grasses in that light, and in the shade / The menacing life. // We played, too, once, in the warmest rooms. / To one content, there is one content / For all mankind. The forest glades/ Are all the more for being in fable, / And wood and town in legend shadowed—/ Once more to return. The one content / Has in it every happiness, more brave / For being purposeless; and so / Those island gardens, deep in the mind, / Make of remoteness familiarity / And of the unspoken name a friend.
Nobody will come to this place. It is a road that leads nowhere. / The solitude is deep. The mountains are high. / But they are desolate, and they turn the traveler’s face / Towards the North. All the sounds of the world are far away. / When the wind rises above the trees, / The boughs bow to the ground. / Even the birds that inhabit the tangle of weeds / That is the roadside cover, are silent. One listens, / But hears no roar of the forest. One is alone. / One will be taken. / One will be taken. / There is no utterance, there is no conversation, / But one is uneasy all the same… / There is a thin blue mist, / A darkness rising like smoke, / And within that darkness / A possession of the heart. / One will be taken… It was here, and it will be here again—/ Here, under this sky empty and full of light.