I gave AI Dungeon a Geoffrey Hill poem as a prompt, and it wrote this (I added the line-breaks, the rest is verbatim as it came out):
The king has landed his hordes from the sky.
He and his dead stand upon the golden roof
of a thousand towers. A half-century of conquest
could not have built such walls, for nothing
could have found the strength in the earth.
But with dead labor, the work goes swiftly
The forests of England are cleared.
Their timbers dragged, and harrows drawn through the stubble.
The woodsmaster and his magic drawls of bone
run down the buildings, slinging up stones and drawing them
with endless streams of laborers.
"My King, the books say that in order for it to hold
they would have to be wide and thick enough
to take the weight of stone." The reader glances at you,
you nod your head. The stones are laid,
two deep and three apart.
They take up the slack, so that there is no sound
of splintering wood or cracking stone.
But there is no more wood. The mills of the realm
are stripped bare, and our ships burn
even as they are unloaded. With our fleet,
we could have blockaded them.
With our fleet, we could have starved them.
But there was no point, for by the time our ships
returned to England, the Norman ships had already sailed.
So England waits. We wait with sword and rifle,
and behind it all is our wall. There will be no more
burning of crops or setting of towns on fire.
They will have to come to us. But that is alright.
For in our walled halls, we can keep the starvation
from their lands, and the plague from their shores.
As I write this, I can hear the endless grating of stone on stone.
The wind blows, and the rain pelts my face.
But I will not leave this wall. For within these four walls,
there is a song. Here is where the true might of England lies.
The story that will be told is not of the collapse
of the British Empire, but of the resurgence
of the Empire of the Dead.
I am but a song, but I am an important one.
I will live on in the pages of history.
Here is the legacy of England.
The king has landed his hordes from the sky.
He and his dead stand upon the golden roof
of a thousand towers. A half-century of conquest
could not have built such walls, for nothing
could have found the strength in the earth.
But with dead labor, the work goes swiftly
The forests of England are cleared.
Their timbers dragged, and harrows drawn through the stubble.
The woodsmaster and his magic drawls of bone
run down the buildings, slinging up stones and drawing them
with endless streams of laborers.
"My King, the books say that in order for it to hold
they would have to be wide and thick enough
to take the weight of stone." The reader glances at you,
you nod your head. The stones are laid,
two deep and three apart.
They take up the slack, so that there is no sound
of splintering wood or cracking stone.
But there is no more wood. The mills of the realm
are stripped bare, and our ships burn
even as they are unloaded. With our fleet,
we could have blockaded them.
With our fleet, we could have starved them.
But there was no point, for by the time our ships
returned to England, the Norman ships had already sailed.
So England waits. We wait with sword and rifle,
and behind it all is our wall. There will be no more
burning of crops or setting of towns on fire.
They will have to come to us. But that is alright.
For in our walled halls, we can keep the starvation
from their lands, and the plague from their shores.
As I write this, I can hear the endless grating of stone on stone.
The wind blows, and the rain pelts my face.
But I will not leave this wall. For within these four walls,
there is a song. Here is where the true might of England lies.
The story that will be told is not of the collapse
of the British Empire, but of the resurgence
of the Empire of the Dead.
I am but a song, but I am an important one.
I will live on in the pages of history.
Here is the legacy of England.