AI tries to help me solve my decade-long poetry problem. It fails again! But I don't.

Good enough.

I have finally, after a decade of attempts, been able to hack together a good-enough dactylic hexametesque poem for Persephone’s birth prophesy!

If you recall, previously I had asked all my poet-friends for help, and sent them running—more like screaming in laughter with their hands in the air—when I told them what I was trying to do. I had next received a bunch of snooty sneers upon asking the local poetry group to help me transform my sing-songy tripe into a form that more closely resembles the ancient Homeric form.

Personally, I think a lot of the sneering had to do with REEEEAL poets not wanting to admit that this project would also send them running because, as we also covered previously, dactylic hexameter is quite problematic to get it right in English.

I also think it chapped asses that somebody who is admittedly NOT a poet…has never studied poetry…just likes to slap some words together and play with refrigerator poetry because sometimes TBI Brain refuses to stop thinking in rhythm and rhyme ever since it had to re-route a bunch of communication channels customarily performed by the left-brain over into the right…that somebody like this fearlessly brought this mess into their midst, no matter the seven-year-old delivery.

Wut?

I’m a big kid. I play with my toys. Passionately.

And the highfalutin end of this very long table did NOT like that. Poetry is serious business, yo! And rhyming is sooooo juvenile.

Shrug? Otay.

I’m also not afraid to expose my rough crap to potentially helpful eyes in the mission to make it better. I’m not afraid to be a beginner in public.

So I, with my outrageous hair (I think it was green, turquoise and blue at that time) and my outrageous clothes (I probably chose bell-bottom pants that matched my hair and paired it with a pretty, flowy, boho top), and my outrageous mouth (once I was welcomed to open it, wellllll…)

I was no longer welcome.

Except by one soft-spoken, pretty, flowy, artsy gal who wrote gorgeous stuff about a sunrise through the trees and the rebirth of her artistic inspiration. She was awesome to me and super encouraging, ensuring me that I had a skeleton to work with. She said the imagery and the story were solid, so I should continue trying to find a resolution to my problem.

Thus I turned to our handy-dandy AI Friends.

Ahem. Yeahhhhh. That was entertaining.

Well, AI has grown up a little, so I figured I’d see what it had to say this morning, because I still haven’t found a single person to help me, and this poem is the main bung-hole clogger in the entire series. It is the biggest and foremost reason why I can’t move this project any further into some sort of official publishy anything.

I do NOT want a sing-songy, seven-year-old nursery rhyme for my prophesy. And this prophesy is everywhere in this series.

Evvverrryyyyy. Wherrrrrre.

So it can’t just be scrapped. Or cryptically talked about. Talked around.

NO.

Was AI any better at transforming my poem this time? Absolutely! The biggest difference: it was capable of concocting new versions without keeping the rhyme this time. It also was extremely educated in why my project is so difficult.

It was not, however, remotely capable of gleaning the nuances in my original poem’s wording that are imperative to keep, because it only knows the classical tales of Persephone & Haides (and any modern versions it’s voraciously devoured, whether or not it had permission to do so). It does not know my version of this myth, so it can’t possibly understand all the obscure double-speak I’m using to confuse, mislead, and downright bamboozle certain deities in our story—MUAhahahah!

(Those certain deities are flipping me off right now, and warning me that They’ll get me for that. Fear not, I woo and bribe and prostrate myself in devotion and eternal thanks all the time, which tends to convince Them that I deserve Divine Mercy for the fictional liberties I take.)

The cool thing about this latest AI adventure was that this machine’s explanation of dactylic hexameter blended with all my previous years of trying to comprehend what makes this form this form, and how to possibly (sorta) mimic it in English (well enough). It was just the right information at the right time, and I’d had just the right amount of sleep, silence, music, and coffee…

Ka-BLAM!

It hit me between the eyes like Zeus’ bolt to the brain.

I whipped out my Homeric Hymn to Demeter, my Iliad, and my Odyssey to try to grok these instructions while seeing it in action as written by the Masters and translated by people who know way more about this stuff than I do.

It’s not like I haven’t done this before.

Alas, I totally forgot that my Odyssey’s translation has been transformed into prose—totally useless for my purpose here. My Homeric Hymn just confused and frustrated me, like it always has, because I couldn’t catch the dance of the words. I couldn’t feel any sort of consistent rhythm, and I feared that the translators went more for remaining true to the vision—to the guts of the tale and the imagery than they did trying to translate it into an English hexametesque meter at the same time.

(I do not friggin’ blame them, and since this hymn is one of the primary sources for my entire plotting and character inspiration, I appreciate the choice to focus on detail and gorgeous language over the meter every day.)

(Either that, or there’s still a dactylic hexameter clue bus that I keep missing.)

(This is not an unlikely scenario.)

My Iliad, however…

This translation finally allowed me to catch it.

Because I had remembered something about this form being a 10-count. Except when it wasn’t. Or…something? So I was more confused than ever, because my Hymn did not adhere to this. Neither did what AI had spat out for me. In all three unsuccessful versions it attempted, the meter ranged from 12 to 16 counts.

Not my Iliad.

I’m gonna put this in dancer-language, because I’m a dancer, not a poet. My Iliad’s meter is like a 3-set waltz, with one extra beat at the end to form a 10-count.

Except when it has two extra beats at the end to form an 11-count.

(Which all the instructions had mentioned—that the end of these lines varied randomly between either the 10- or 11-count.)

Hence:

ONE two-three, ONE two-three, ONE two-three, four.
ONE two-three, ONE two-three, ONE two-three, four-five.

Or you can feel it:

ONE two-three, FOUR five-six, SEVEN eight-nine, ten.
ONE two-three, FOUR five-six, SEVEN eight-nine, ten-eleven.

That’s how my Iliad felt when I started counting syllables.

Which is what finally allowed me to compare/contrast the way AI had tinkered with my poem versus my original. From there, I finally figured out how to expand it from my sing-songy 8-count into the 10-count (except when it’s randomly 11).

Annnnnnd now I really, really want my poem to be a song. Which is 100% beyond me. There is no way I can even jerry-rig a good-enough skeleton to play with, then take advice and suggestions to make it better, because melodic musical composition is not a skill my brain remotely possesses. (I can concoct percussive sequences all day in my sleep.)

However.

I do have some musician friends who have enjoyed transforming my words into songs in the past so…we’ll see. Because the way that English stresses syl-LA-bles is not always naturally conducive to this 10-count (except when it’s randomly 11). But singing it?

You can get away with all sorts of tweaked-stressy stuff when you set words to music.

Anyway. Squirrel! So I now have the bare bones of a dactylic hexametesque poem to tinker with.

Also.

😈

Have you figured out yet what a contrary little shit I am? Yeah, remember those Snooty McSneersons who looked at my sing-songy rhymey-tripe down their bespectacled noses?

Well, I kept my fucking rhymes.

I simply didn’t put them at the end of lines.
No, no, within the secondary phrases they twines.
For such jingle-jangle my inner seven-year-old pines.
And I do not care if Snooty McSneerson whines.

So there, and NEH.

And anyway, Hekate has already established the rhyming propensity when She prophesies. So now I have a form inspired by the ancient Homeric style, with English hacks and some personalized, middle-finger tweaks.

Wut?

It’s the form my deities use for prophesies and that, in a few millennia, piddly humans will adopt for their epics and worshipful hymns. They’ll eventually name it dactylic hexameter.

Hush you. Use your imagination and help me make it better.

Here is my skeletal prototype:

Bringer of Blossomtime, O Sprite of Light
Delicate fingers weave the might of ages
Flowers do bloom at her softest caressing
Her very footsteps fall, blessing the earth

Persephone: radiant and dual-named
Gentle soul with untamed fire in her eyes
Rosy her cheeks, and rose-blushed her gold pate
Her sweet lips, rose-kissed, shall bait all who spy her

From this act Sky shall turn his head aside
As this maid becomes a bride, violent-made
Woe! Find her chained and splayed upon his wall
Dragged screaming to her fall, never retrieved

There shall she rest and lay her silver’d head
There where oath-making stream is fed and seething
There where souls haven’t any need of sleeping
All shall rue her mother’s weeping and wrath

Soul of Nightshade, The Thresher, Bride of Rot
Cursed her seed, woeful lot to be born
Sing! Now spring and frolic. Dance overjoyed!
All is nurtured and destroyed in her kiss

Yet from the ash, ancient wound shall be mended
Ages-old strife is suspended and balmed
Mother, friend, sister, and aunt come unhinged
Long-damned and doomed, now avenged! She shall rise.

So there ya go. It’s getting there.

This isn’t one step closer. This is like…I finally finished rappelling down the cliff side, outwitted Kerberos as I snuck across the abyss floor with the 10-mile cord attached to my rope ladder, and I’ve hacked-clawed-pick-axed-toe-picked my way up the other side of the cliff to finally tie the sucker off on the far side.

If you ARE a poet, especially a classical one, and my verse is driving you bonkers, feel free to comment your suggestions. This is just the prototype.

*collapsing against the rock to pant and laugh*

(The gleam in my eyes may look a little unhinged, and my cackling may have a few maniacal notes to it. So would yours, if you were dealing with dactylic hexameter in English when you’re NOT a poet or a classical scholar, but instead you’re just a harebrained, audacious, overly ambitious writey-fighty-dancer-nerd.)

Whuff.

And now I’m wondering what the equivalent of a mic-drop in Homer’s time was…

© 2025 Hartebeast

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