Emily Dickinson as Markov Process, Clayton Cafiero

Emily Dickinson as Markov Process

Clayton Cafiero

The following is a by-product of demonstrating Markov processes to students in CS111 (introduction to computer science) at Saint Michael's College in the fall of 2021. A Markov process is a stochastic (probabilistic) model which describes a collection of states (here words in a poem) and transitions between states. That is, given that the current word is Xi, our Markov model gives probabilities for the next word in the sequence, Xi+1. You've no doubt seen a similar process at work when you start typing search terms into a search engine, which then guesses the next word or words based on what you've typed so far. Markov processes have no "memory" so the probability of each next possible state depends only on the current state. How do we arrive at the probabilities? We read through a corpus (in this case a subset of Emily Dickinson's poems) and calculate the frequencies with which one word follows another. A Markov process is used here to generate a very crude approximation of Emily Dickinson. The choice of words is determined using the observed frequencies in a collection of Emily Dickinson's poems. With apologies to E.D. and her devoted fans.

Because I could give them early Such a swelling of me I wonder if they choose between. It would not guess the gale is heard. It asked a stolid ear pipe — The sweet birds in the storm That could not guess the date of want, And never in the fashions Of nerve enlightened To note that hurt them. Any balm or did it just begin? I meet with feathers that kept so many warm — Light that perches in ignorant cadence. Ah, what sagacity perished here! Don't tell! The ground, the haze, a pair of the storm.

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“Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. ... here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why?”

~ Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five