The bad weather rolled in from the sea, summer was at end. One sat on the cold wet rocks and sang thus:

“Grim Gothic Winter strides apace,

Cutting down sweet summer’s Grace.

Scythes with ice-bound Blade away,

The Blooms that sprang so fair in May.


Cold northern Blasts our Voices still,

Echoing from the summer Hill.

Frozen Fingers touch me now,

And chill my hot and fevered Brow.


Hard hearted Season end your reign,

Ceding me my Realm again.

Calling back the Time that’s gone,

The Time when she and I were One.”

We have had considerable difficulty with the above ever since it was found inscribed on the fly leaf of Adamson’s Guide to Artificial Insemination. When solicited recently for an opinion, one of the Spice Girls volunteered,

“Welwe, somebody just made it up then. Din they?”

“In all probability you are right my fairest”, the interviewer neglected to say, hitting back with, “Ah but who? That’s what the viewers would like to know.”

“Welwe, I dunno, do I?”

This effectively closed the conversation, leaving the matter where it rests today.

Not that it could be said to be resting. Academic eyries are being shaken and literary eagles risk falling out. After a dormant decade, a Finsbury Park Imam has splashed into print denouncing the use of sex in medicine as a vehicle for poetic expression. His Hampstead colleagues were at a loss to know where he was coming from until the Danish Cartoonist revealed, in the columns of the Sun newspaper, that he had forwarded a copy of the text in question with notes on its provenance to the Imam as a peace offering. It seems to have been a singularly ineffective gesture.

Unwilling to be outdone, occidental scholarship in the shape of Jacko Smyrnovich in the American Journal of Insemination, offered this, the first critical textual appraisal:

“It goes without saying that the first two lines are not poetry (which is more than can be said for the rest). Adhering to my grandmother’s advice not to jump into bed without first looking what’s under the bedclothes, it behoves us to examine content before tackling the knotty subject of form. Fortunately the content is not extensive, in other words there’s not a lot of it. The whole work can be paraphrased thus:

Flowers being cut

Chill out!

Where’s my girl?

From this we can be confident that this is not a narrative poem, this story line is going nowhere. Tentatively, and subject to further analysis, I would put it into the category of Reflections, of the sort usually seen in a schooner of Bud, States-side that is.

Form gives us more to chew on, posing the existential question, “Are we being taken for a ride?” The capitalization could lead us in that direction. Ostensibly, this is an 18th century composition, probably by a Limey because most American poets were colonials until late in the century and there are no particularly colonial traits on show. We are in all probability in the hands of an impostor. Choosing Adamson’s work as the vehicle for transmission is a dead giveaway seeing that it was first published in London in 1922. Anyone wishing to write something inspiring on the fly of this otherwise deadly work had, post 1922, the whole gamut of world poetry (Longfellow, Whittier, Nash, Dickinson etc. to mention but a few,) to choose from.

In summary, we are dealing with a scribbler, who chose this unorthodox method of bringing his work to public notice to avoid publication costs and peer review.”

Despite this there are still those, academic and lay, who see or would wish to see in this more than meets the eye. Doubtless in the coming years, decades, nay, even centuries the question of the “AI text” will be raised. We may expect all barricades to be both manned and stormed.